Civil & Environmental Engineering Announcements and Awards

March 25, 2008

CEE Department Welcomes 4 New Members into the Hall of Distinction

The Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering (CEE) is pleased to announce four new inductees to the CEE Hall of Distinction.  The inductees are John “Jack” Donahue, Jr. (2006), Ronald Rodi (2006), J. Tinsley Oden (2007), and Recep Yilmaz (2007).  The new inductees will be recognized at the CEE department’s annual Hall of Distinction Banquet, to be held on April 10 at the Lod Cook Alumni Center.

LSU’s CEE established a Hall of Distinction to recognize individuals who have made stalwart contributions to the profession.  Candidates are carefully selected based on a substantial impact in their field and/or to the Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering.  In honoring these individuals, the Department intends to recognize all those who have contributed to Engineering excellence.For more information about new and previous inductees, please visit the Department’s website at http://www.cee.lsu.edu.  A complete list of CEE Hall of Distinction members is available on the website, under the “People” section.

Dr. Brian Wolshon Receives James M. Todd Award

Dr. Brian Wolshon, PE, Associate Professor in the CEE Department, received the 2008 James M. Todd Technical Accomplishment Medal from the Louisiana Engineering Society.  This medal is awarded for distinguished service by an engineer for technological advancement or discoveries that have contributed to advancements in engineering.

Dr. Wolshon specializes in the field of highway design and traffic engineering.  His research in the operational traffic conditions associated with emergency evacuations has enabled him to measure traffic flow conditions under contra flow operation, information used by the Louisiana Department of Transportation and Development to plan and design emergency evacuation plans for the southern part of the state. This plan was implemented during Hurricane Katrina and enabled DOTD to greatly reduce the evacuation time from New Orleans.  Now, due to the outstanding success of this model, it is being used throughout the United States.

Dr. Cai Receives Best Paper Award

The paper entitled, “Monitoring of FRP-repair debonding using OTDR Techniques,” co-authored by Hou, S., Cai, C. S., and Ou, J.P. is elected as the Best Paper of the Intelligent Sensor and Actuator Symposium as recommended by the Best Paper Award Committee at the ASCE Earth and Space Conference 2008. Debonding failure has been reported as the dominant failure mode for fiber reinforced polymers (FRP) strengthening of beams. Optic time-domain Relectometer (OTDR) technology has been widely used in optical telecommunication industries. For example, the OTDR meter is routinely used by the staff at the LSU Office of Telecommunications to check if a fiber optical cable is broken. If the optic cable breaks or bends, then the light cannot pass the cable smoothly, from which one can tell if the cable breaks or not. This paper explores a novel debonding monitoring method for FRP strengthened structures by means of OTDR-based fiber optic technology. When debonding occurs, it bends the optic fiber and causes an optic power loss. This information is acquired with a data acquisition system.  Experimental studies were carried out at the laboratory of Bridge Innovative Research and Dynamics of Structures (BIRDS) at LSU.  

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