News

Peter and Joel from our group have been awarded the departmental Outstanding GSI Award for the academic year 2020-2021. Since joining our group in 2018, Peter has been a GSI for CE179 (Fall 2018) and CE273 (Spring 2019, Spring 2020). Meanwhile, Joel had the opportunity to GSI three different Geotechnical Engineering classes: CE175 (Spring 2020), CE270 (Fall 2020), and CE273 (Spring 2021). These are some… Read More »2020-2021 Civil & Environmental Engineering Outstanding GSI Award for Peter and Joel!

The Spring 2021 issue of Berkeley Engineer magazine features Professor Kenichi Soga’s pioneering work in the field of distributed fiber optic sensing (DFOS). Read more, here.

Some of the Soga Research Group members pose for a socially-distanced group portrait at the Berkeley Rose Garden in Berkeley, Calif. on Monday, March 8, 2021. We also welcome Miguel, a Ph.D. student from Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, who will be joining our group as a visiting researcher for the upcoming 6 months. (Photos by Adam Lau/Berkeley Engineering)

The city-scale research team recently published a paper in the Cambridge Journal of Data-Centric Engineering that uses innovative sources of real-world data to calibrate a widely used empirical relationship in traffic engineering [1]. The paper aims to address the difficulty of calibrating the macroscopic relationship between traffic volume and speed. Specifically, it combines the traffic volume data from Transport for London’s Automated Traffic Counters (Figure… Read More »Context-specific volume–delay curves by combining crowd-sourced traffic data with automated traffic counters: A case study for London

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