Bowen Lab Projects - Buildings

The objective of this project was to study the seismic response of structural walls with a vertical stack of openings that terminate in a solid wall in the lower stories in building structures.

Component tests on the concrete slab on metal deck include uniaxial tests to evaluate behavior in both orthogonal directions with respect to the deck corrugations, and shear and tension tests of the sidelap splices. Parameters include metal deck thickness and type of sidelap (e.g., button punch, screw, weld). This study is part of a collaborative research project with U. Washington (connection tests) and U.Illinois (system tests). Test results will be used to validate and update computational models for evaluation of robustness of steel buildings.

This project investigates the inelastic buckling analysis of continuous steel wide flange gravity columns under partial fire loading. During a fire event, portions of the building may remain at ambient conditions despite other areas of the structure heated by fire. The goal of this research is to study the behavior of inelastic column buckling during an isolated fire event and determine the magnitude of the stabilizing moments gained through surrounding ambient structural elements.

Advanced structural damping systems such as magnetorheological dampers have great potential to play a large role in our ability to achieve performance-based structural design (PBD) directed towards seismic resilience. This research project focuses on the development of appropriate performance-based design procedures and model-based simulation techniques for advanced damping systems in civil engineering applications.