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Cracking in clay is an important phenomenon that affects the long-term durability of many civil structures such as dams, levees, embankments, and landfills. In order to understand the behavior of cracking in clay, researchers at SRG, Hayato Nonaka and Yaobin Yang, conducted a four-point bending experiment on compacted kaolin clay beams. Distributed fiber optic sensors (DFOS) were embedded in the clay specimens at different heights… Read More »Crack development monitoring using distributed fiber optic sensing technology

Linqing Luo and Prof. Kenichi Soga from our group recently published a paper in Journal of Lightwave Technology. Y. Mei, X. Xu, L. Luo and K. Soga, “Reconstruction of Distributed Strain Profile Using a Weighted Spectrum Decomposition Algorithm for Brillouin Scattering Based Fiber Optic Sensor,” in Journal of Lightwave Technology, vol. 38, no. 22, pp. 6385-6392, 15 Nov.15, 2020, doi: 10.1109/JLT.2020.3011686. Brillouin scattering based fiber optic… Read More »A recently published work on Fiber Optic Sensor

The bay area has several active seismic faults. In order to supply water for its 1.4 million customers, the East Bay Municipal Utility District (EBMUD) must maintain pipe infrastructure that cross these hazards. Researchers at SRG have been working with EBMUD to develop a monitoring system for the most critical pipes in the east bay’s water supply network. Recently, a bending test was conducted at… Read More »Testing a Distributed Monitoring System for EBMUD’s Water Mains

Prof. Kenichi Soga and colleagues recently published three articles on geomechanics, particularly on the modeling of failure of geomaterials by using the Finite Element Method (FEM).  Wang, C., Hawlader, B., Perret, D., & Soga, K. (2020). Effects of geometry and soil properties on type and retrogression of landslides in sensitive clays. Géotechnique, 1-15. https://doi.org/10.1680/jgeot.20.P.046 Mallikarachchi, H. and Soga, K., 2020. Post-localisation analysis of drained and undrained… Read More »New Publications on Geomechanics

Distributed fiber optic sensors (DFOS) can be used for a wide variety of applications. Among them, distributed temperature sensing (DTS) uses the physical changes in a fiber core, as observed by probing light pulses, to measure the temperature of the environment surrounding the fiber. This is extremely useful to measure continuous temperature profiles in the subsurface for geothermal exploration. SRG recently installed DTS in a… Read More »Geothermal Monitoring for the Future of CEE

The 4th GeoSystems Engineering Annual Research Symposium has been successfully held on Friday, November 20th, 2020. The event was attended by 112 people, with the proportion between academic and industry/government of about 60:40, and the proportion between the UC Berkeley community and the communities outside of about 50:50. Different from the previous years, due to the Covid-19 pandemic this year the event was held virtually. … Read More »GeoSystems Annual Research Symposium

Surprise! One thing we do during our group meeting (even virtually)

Ruonan Ou’s work “Soil Fracture Generation Monitoring using Distributed Fiber Optic Sensing (DFOS) Technology”  won the Best Poster Award in the Virtual Signals in the Soil (SitS) Workshop hosted by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the USDA-National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA), and the United Kingdom Research and Innovation (UKRI) councils. Congratulations , Ruonan!  Fig.1   Instrumentation of distributed fiber optic sensors in the soil inside a… Read More »Best Poster Award- Signals in the Soil Workshop

Photo Source: Carnegie Mellon University AI4ALL Millard McElwee, a PhD Candidate in our group, is featured in Washington Monthly’s September/October issue, which highlights his current research and reasons for pursuing engineering. Millard first realized he wanted to study engineering during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, which left New Orleans largely destroyed. Not only did he want to understand why the city’s levees had… Read More »Millard is featured in Washington Monthly

Our group presented our work on the annual Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research Center (PEER) researcher meeting.  Renjie Wu & Bingyu Zhao presented their work:  City-scale multi-infrastructure network resilience simulation tool with collaboration of Charles Wang from SimCenter.  Michael Virtucio & Bingyu Zhao presented their work: Performance Based Economic Loss Assessment Due to a Hypothetical Large Southern California Earthquake Based on the Disruption and Recovery of Port… Read More »PEER Researcher Meeting