The Charles E. Via, Jr. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering

Ten years have passed since Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast of the United States.

Deemed one of the strongest storms to impact the coast during the last 100 years, Katrina made landfall with a Category-3 rating on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale, bringing with it sustained winds of 100-140 miles per hour, a span of some 400 miles, and massive flooding over 80 percent of New Orleans.

The aftermath was catastrophic.  Read more…

Geotechnical engineering can lead engineers to remote places all over the world.

Nina Stark, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at Virginia Tech, experienced this type of seclusion on her recent visit to Herschel Island, located in the Beaufort Sea off the coast of the Yukon Territory in Canada. In fact, it is Yukon’s northernmost point, where people do not permanently reside.

Read more..

Blacksburg, VA , March 21, 2014
Virginia Tech College of Engineering

When the Canterbury earthquake of 2010-11 struck in the Christchurch area of New Zealand, wide spread liquefaction occurred, allowing the soil to behave more like a liquid.  As a result of tectonic movements and subsidence due to this liquefaction, large portions of Christchurch became susceptible to flooding.

So, when in early March of this year, as heavy rains fell in this same area, and were described by the town’s mayor as a one in a 100 year event, further destruction wreaked new havoc on this largest city in the South Island of New Zealand.

As a result, the U.S. based National Science Foundation is supporting a team of experts, including Nina Stark, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at Virginia Tech, to investigate the impacts of this most recent flooding, labeled by professionals in the geotechnical community as an extreme event.

Stark and the other members of the team were selected by the Geotechnical Extreme Events Reconnaissance (GEER) Association. This association attempts to collect data immediately after an extreme event such as an earthquake, a tsunami, or a flood.

According to a GEER press release, the team will focus on understanding how a large liquefaction event impacts the damaging effects of another extreme event that follows it.  The team will be focusing in critical infrastructure performance such as sewer and water networks, foundations of critical structures, levee networks, and other lifelines.

Stark was in New Zealand gathering information from March 17 thru March 21.

GEER assembled this multidisciplinary team to investigate the wide range of hazardous aspects of the recent Christchurch flood event. John Allen, a professional engineer at TRI Environmental Inc., is leading the GEER team. Co-Leader is Sonia Giovinazzi, research fellow at the University of Canterbury.  Joining them are Craig Davis, of the Department of Water and Power for the city of Los Angeles, Calif.; Laurie Johnson of Laurie Johnson Consulting; William Siembieda of California Polytechnic of San Luis Obispo; Rebecca Teasley of the University of Minnesota Duluth; and Stark.

The US GEER team will be working closely with New Zealand engineers and scientists to document the effects of this flood event that may have been affected by the
2010-2011 Canterbury earthquake sequence.

Stark joined the Virginia Tech faculty in the fall of 2013 from a postdoctoral fellow position she held since 2012 at the Dalhousie University’s Department of Oceanography in Halifax, Canada.

From 2007 until 2010, Stark was a research assistant at the MARUM Center for Marine and Environmental Science.  During that time she participated in some 20 research cruises and field experiments in the North Sea, Baltic Sea, Northern and Southern areas of the Pacific Ocean, and in different lakes in New Zealand. In 2011 she became a postdoctoral fellow with the university.

Stark earned her master’s degree in geophysics from the Department of Physics at Westphalian Wilhelms University of Muenster, Germany in 2007.  She also minored in the physics of solids and surfaces, mineralogy, and inorganic chemistry. She obtained her doctorate in marine geotechnics at the MARUM Center for Marine and Environmental Sciences at the University of Bremen, Germany in 2011.

Blacksburg, VA

January 10th, 2014

Most days the public takes feats in engineering for granted, for example: something as simple as, driving across a bridge.  Advances in engineering have made it possible to cross-vast bodies of water by building structures within the coastal or marine environment.  The safety of these structures relies on the stability of their foundations and continued research on the conditions in which these foundations exist offer insight to the challenge of building in water.

Dr. Nina Stark, assistant professor in the geotechnical area of civil engineering, joined the university after finishing her postdoctoral work at Dalhousie University’s Department of Oceanography in Halifax, Canada.  Her research focuses on coastal and marine geotechnics.  She investigates coastal sediment dynamics from a physical and geotechnical perspective, including beach dynamics, subaqueous bedform evolution and migration, navigation channel development, and structure-sediment interaction in the coastal zone.  Particularly, scour is one of her main research interests, and she has been working on different projects investigating the development of scour around offshore renewable energy converters, such as wind turbines.

Stark teaches, coastal and marine geotechnics, which focuses on introducing graduate students to coastal zone and marine environments and how to conduct geotechnical in-situ surveying in such areas.  After participating in a kayaking trip in August with Blacksburg Parks and Recreation, Stark came up with an idea for a project for her class.  Students would have to plan, design and execute a lab with the help of Blacksburg parks and recreation to study the effects of erosion (scour) on test pieces in the New River.

The students broke up into different groups, in an effort to assign tasks, with some serving as project managers, some focusing on scour protection or monitoring and others working on the construction of the lab and monitoring flow.  When asked how building and managing the project together as a team worked, one student, Paul Johnston said,  “decisions made might not have been exactly what one person in the group would have wanted, but everyone came together to make the project stronger” “no-one really had veto power on ideas.”  The exercise offered the students hands on experience in what research will be like outside of the classroom.  Allowing them to work together as a cohesive unit, building the project from design, execution to conclusion.

Students worked with Travis Coad the Outdoor Supervisor from Blacksburg parks and recreation to find a site suitable for the experiment.  Sayantani Ghosh contacted Coad and worked with him to choose and area of the river that offered a good amount of flow.  They settled on a section of the river near Eggleston Bridge in Giles County Virginia after visiting other areas.

On Sunday, November 17^th Stark, nine students and two town employees headed to the location to begin the experiment, which last about five hours.  Students sank a canoe to modify the natural flow, used floating ping-pong balls to measure

the flow, and built the TARUS scour protection, a netted, doughnut shaped gravel ring, to name just a few of the tasks. (See picture to the right).  The TARUS slid over their test pipe and served as protection against scour.  The control pipe was just placed in the riverbed with no protection, it lasted about forty-five minutes before falling down.  The pipe with the TARUS was still standing at the end of the experiment.

Working in the field of the New River gave hands on experience as to why the topic of scour is such an important issue when building structures in water. One student remarked that graduate courses can be very theoretical, so it was nice to be so “hands on” during this project, reiterating the motto ‘hands on, minds on.’

Blacksburg, VA

December 3, 2013

The Organization of American States awarded Ph.D. candidate Alfonso Rivera a prestigious graduate scholarship for the 2014-2015 academic year.  The OAS Academic Scholarship Program was established in 1958, and grants scholarships every year for pursuit of Master’s Degrees, Doctoral Degrees and Research leading to a degree. The OAS Special Caribbean Scholarships Program (SPECAF), established in 1983, grants scholarships for the last two years of undergraduate studies to citizens and residents of the English-speaking Caribbean OAS Member States. Both programs follow the OAS Manual of Procedures for the Scholarship and Training Program. In addition to these programs the OAS, through its Partnerships Program for Education and Training (PAEC), is able to offer other attractive scholarship opportunities for academic studies with the support of its partner institutions in the Americas and around the world. PAEC is administered in accordance with the provision of the respective corporation agreement and in line with the principles set forth in the OAS Manual of Procedures for the Scholarship and Training Program.

Rivera is currently pursuing his doctoral degree under the supervision of Dr. Guney Olgun and Dr. Thomas L. Brandon in the area of Geotechnical Engineering