Civil Engineering staff were awarded several prodigious research funds this year including two Young Scientists Funds from National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC), and one General Fund from Zhejiang Basic and Commonweal Research Programme. Detailed information are listed below.
1. Project title: Seismic performance of reinforced concrete beam-column joints with headed diagonal reinforcements
Funder: National Natural Science Foundation of China
Lead investigator: Dr Bo Li
Beam-column joints are the most critical members in reinforced concrete moment-resisting structures under earthquake. Proper detailing is essential to ensure the seismic performance of beam-column joints. The project aims to develop an innovative headed diagonal reinforcement for beam-column joints. It can enhance the seismic performance of beam-column joints and improve the constructability through alleviating congested detailing.
2. Project title: The key studies of Satellite-difference RTK PPP applied in huge bridge deformation
Funder: National Natural Science Foundation of China
Lead investigator: Dr Xu Tang
Double difference (DD) GNSS has been applied in many huge bridges' monitoring. The DD has its limitations and disadvantages in some circumstance, e.g. the distance between the base station and the roving receivers, as well as natural disasters such as earthquakes, limit the applications of DD GNSS due to the failure to mitigate atmospheric and other error sources; the cost will increase for the reference station management. Satellite difference RTK PPP is going to be developed for bridge deformation, without reference station, in real time. This project includes the following topics and programmes: (1) The optimal filter model for the RTK PPP, applied in bridge deformation. Technologies could be summarized: Fractional-cycle biases (FCBs) are estimation; receiver clock error’s elimination; regional troposphere delay correction in filter. 2) satellite difference PPP ambiguity fixing in real time. Technologies could be summarized: matrix transformation in integral domain; ambiguity reliability assessment based on the hypothesis testing and f-distribution. This project will rich the methods of bridge monitoring by using GNSS. The usefulness in potential applications and its scientific significance are observably.
3. Project title: Study of multiple principal stress rotations in soil and geotechnical engineering applications
Funder: Zhejiang Basic and Commonweal Research Programme
Lead investigator: Dr Yunming Yang
The impact of principal stress rotations (PSR) and non-coaxiality on soil behaviour has been extensively studied. However, all these studies are limited to the PSR along one direction. There are PSRs along multiple directions in many geotechnical engineering applications. The project aims to conduct a comprehensive and in-depth study on multiple PSRs from the perspectives of experimentation, constitutive modeling and numerical simulations.