Title: Life Prediction of Structures: from deep sea to deep space and in between
Speaker: Fang Pan (Southwest Research Institute)
Time: Thursday, January 4, 2017, 9:00 am
Venue: Room 7201,Building No.7,WuShan Campus
Contents: Life prediction of structures, from deep-sea submersibles under high pressure, to land-based buildings and bridges threatened by natural hazards, and to deep space shuttles experiencing intense vibrations/thermal cycles/debris impacts, is important to maintain the integrity, safety and functionality of a wide spectrum of structures.
The seamless integration of advanced analysis and simulation technologies, validation experiments and testing, well-controlled fabrication, systematic non-destructive inspections and evaluations, and reliable damage mitigation lays down a solid foundation for many significant projects completed by SwRI in the past 66 years. Examples include, the “life-extending” technology update of a U.S. Navy’s legacy program for Alvin submersible (6500 meter operating depth); the NASGRO? software initially developed for fracture control analysis of NASA space shuttle and now widely used in analyzing metal fatigue and fracture in the industry; and a variety of commercial facility development for critical operating conditions such as high temperature & high pressure (i.e., 550 ?C and 200 MPa for chemical refinery reactors) and corrosive environment.
For civil engineering applications, life prediction of critical infrastructures is also a core issue for the land-based structures, such as buildings and bridges under extreme natural events. A probabilistic approach for assessing the vulnerability probability of critical components in low-rise building under strong hurricane winds funded by National Science Foundation and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) will be presented as well.
Introduction of the speaker: Fang Pan received her B.S. and M.S. in Civil Engineering from Tongji University in 2002 and 2005, respectively, and her Ph.D. from Louisiana State University in 2014. Between those, she worked in Tongji Architectural Design Group at Shanghai, completing the design of more than 30 bridges. Her expertise on the vulnerability assessment for buildings under strong winds through stochastic analysis, wind tunnel experiments, and large-scale experimental validations brought her to SwRI, where she widens her vision and deepens her understanding of the life prediction for a wide spectrum of structures from the deep sea to the deep space, and many land-based structures in between.
