Shahria Alam stands near some of the concrete bridge piers tested at the Applied Laboratory for Advanced Materials and Structures at the University of British Columbia. Alam and a former PhD student have developed a residual drift-based design for concrete bridges that emloys a super-elastic reinforcement alloy.
An engineering professor and his former PhD student at UBC’s Okanagan campus in Kelowna have developed “a residual drift-based design” for concrete bridges that employs a super-elastic reinforcement alloy which can withstand the impact of earthquakes. Conventional reinforced steel, by comparison, sustains “large deformation demand during big earthquakes which causes the steel to strain beyond its elastic limit,” says Shahria Alam, associate professor in the school of engineering at UBC’s Okanagan campus in Kelowna. A case in point is the earthquake that hit Kobe, Japan, in 1995 leaving more than 100 steel reinforced concrete bridges beyond repair. If those bridges were reinforced with a super-elastic memory alloy, they might have only required “minor repairs” because theContinue reading
