Davis is the largest of the nine UC campuses

Engineering III - New home of Civil and Environmental Engineering.

inarea, second largest in budget, and third largest in enrollment. Despite the relatively large student population, the campus is relaxed and informal, with emphasis on students’ intellectual development, personal growth and overall well-being. UC Davis was one of only two schools in the nation to receive the 1996 Jeanne Clery National Safe Campus Award. Our students come from all California counties, all 50 states, and 111 foreign countries. Our undergraduate student body can be characterized as very diverse, reflecting many geographical and cultural backgrounds, and many age groups. This campus mix creates a wide range of enriching experiences and qualities. Most UC Davis students bike to classes using the campus bicycle pathways that connect with city bike lanes. As many as 18,000 bicyclists travel along UC Davis bike paths in a single day.

The Center for Geotechnical Modeling operates the UC Davis NEES Geotechnical Centrifuge. The centrifuge has a 9-meter radius, and can carry 5-ton payloads. The centrifuge is equipped with a servo-hydraulic shaker to simulate effects of earthquakes on geotechnical and soil-structure interaction problems. The centrifuge has been upgraded to include advanced robotics, new sensors and instrumentation systems, geophysical testing, increased centrifugal acceleration, biaxial shaking, and teleoperation capabilities. A new 400m2 sample preparation and office building, housing a visualization facility, is also part of the NEES upgrade project. Data reports, and more information about the centrifuge facilities and the NEES upgrades, may be obtained from http://nees.ucdavis.edu.

The soil-pile interaction facility at UC Davis

Engineering II is home to the Dean and student services as well as several labs and two academic departments.

consists of a large soil container having a diameter of 6.7 m and depth of 5.5 m. The facility is equipped with vertical and lateral reaction systems for applying gravity and lateral loads to piles embedded in soil. Recently completed projects include full-scale tests of 70-ton concrete piles currently used by the California Department of Transportation. Of particular interest are the influence of soil density on lateral response of the pile and the magnitude of local ductility demand upon formation of a plastic hinge in the pile. Test results indicate that the lateral strength of the soil-pile system is not overly sensitive to the soil density and tends to be dominated by the flexural strength of the pile. The plastic hinge length of piles also was found to be larger than that of an equivalent fixed-base column.

The department possesses well equipped laboratories for research and instruction. The department maintains UNIX workstations, a Macintosh instructional laboratory, a network of MS-Windows computers, and a Linux based Computational Mechanics Laboratory. Other equipment includes Silicon Graphics and Hewlett-Packard workstations in addition to digitizers and plotters. A computer-aided engineering laboratory and an image processing center, run by the College of Engineering, and a large campus computer facility are also available to graduate students. The department operates two parallel computer clusters, a 250+ node cluster for air quality modeling and a 16 node cluster for geotechnical modeling:
http://sokocalo.engr.ucdavis.edu/~jeremic/GeoWulf.

Our geotechnical laboratories include a torsional hollow cylinder device, cyclic triaxial devices with low- and high-strain measurement capabilities, electrical conductivity and dielectric dispersion measuring devices for the laboratory and in situ, soil erosion devices, and piezo-ceramic bender element equipment.

Research is also conducted at a number of research facilities on campus, including the Center for Geotechnical Modeling, the Institute of Transportation Studies, the Water Resources Center, and the J. Amorocho Hydraulics Laboratory.

The Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering provides Master’s and Doctoral programs in the following areas of specialization:

• Environmental Engineering
• Geotechnical Engineering
• Structural Engineering and Structural Mechanics
• Transportation Planning and Design
• Water Resource Engineering

Details about the Graduate Programs may be found at: http://cee.engr.ucdavis.edu/gradinfo/. Applications for graduate study should be submitted early, if possible; the first official deadline for applications is January 15. Students interested in graduate studies at UC Davis should contact the Graduate Assistant by email at civilengineering@ucdavis.edu or phone 530-752-1441.

The Civil and Environmental Engineering Department at UC Davis is engaged in theoretical and experimental earthquake engineering research. The research encompasses faculty in the Structural Engineering and Structural Mechanics and Geotechnical Engineering subdisciplines, and features a unique collaboration between these subdisciplines. Topics of research include the following:

• Cyclic behavior of reinforced concrete bridge columns
• Seismic behavior of level and stepped cripple walls for woodframe residential construction
• Energy-based cumulative damage assessment of structures
• Full-scale tests of reinforced concrete masonry walls
• Soil-foundation-structure interaction
• Earthquake-induced liquefaction and lateral spreading
• Finite Element Modeling of dynamic behavior of structural and geotechnical problems
• Site investigation, soil characterization and geophysical testing
• Estimation of ground motion parameters, attenuation relations, and frequency content
• Centrifuge modeling on the NEES Geotechnical Centrifuge
• Advanced sensors and information technology
• Micro-structure, structural component, and structural system level research
• Non-destructive evaluation of material properties
• Computational analysis of fracture