UCLA Civil & Environmental Engineering Department

C&EE 200 Section 1 Seminar

Structural, Geotechnical and Civil Engineering Materials

Multifunctional Cementitious Materials for Addressing Infrastructure Challenges

Mo Li, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor, University of California, Irvine

Today’s needs to improve concrete infrastructure service life and resilience are challenged by the limitations with concrete materials that are intrinsically quasi-brittle, and the absence of spatial damage sensing methods to inform timely maintenance and prevent structural failure. Concrete is susceptible to cracking and deterioration under service conditions and damage under extreme hazard events. Current management practices of concrete infrastructure rely on regular visual inspections that can be subjective and are limited to accessible locations. Structural health monitoring approaches mainly depend on point-based sensors that provide local measurements and cannot identify spatial damage such as cracking and corrosion. To tackle these challenges, this work focuses on a new direct, spatial sensing approach based on novel multifunctional cementitious materials. Multifunctional cementitious materials are encoded with a distributed microcracking damage process coupled with damage self-sensing capacity. The sequential formation of steady-state microcracks during material strain-hardening stage leads to a prolonged damage process and high damage tolerance, while allowing detection of damage level long before failure occurs. The unique electromechanical behavior of the material enables strain and damage self-sensing functionalities during elastic and post-cracking stages. Through advancements in tomography methods, spatial mapping offering a visual depiction and quantification of damage in concrete members is achieved by electrical probing only from the boundaries. This talk highlights the research on these developments at the interface of science and engineering.

Where: Geology Building 4660

When: 1:00 – 1:50 PM on Tuesday, November 6, 2018

 Dr. Mo Li is an Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and Assistant Professor of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science at the University of California, Irvine. She received her M.S. in Civil Engineering, M.S. in Industrial and Operations Engineering, and Ph.D. in Civil Engineering from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She did her undergraduate studies at Tongji University in China. Her research focuses on nonconventional infrastructure materials, and their interfaces with structural engineering, health monitoring, and advanced manufacturing methods. Examples are intrinsic and repeatable self-healing cementitious materials, bio-inspired self-sensing and visualization of spatial damage in concrete structures, damage-tolerant geopolymers, and 3D printing concrete for highly loaded structures. She is the recipient of the Samueli Faculty Career Development Professorship, the Innovation in Teaching Award, and is the Director of the Infrastructure Materials Research and Advanced Manufacturing Laboratory at UCI. She has served as a principle investigator for a number of federal-, state- and industry-funded projects.