Time: 2015-06-18 15:00

Place: Ruth Mulan Chu Chao Building  Room A1006

Reporter:

Prof.Bak Kong LOW, F.ASCE

PhD (U.C.Berkeley), MS and BS (MIT)

Associate Professor

School of Civil and Environmental Engineering

College of Engineering

Nanyang Technological University? Singapore

Email address: bklow@alum.mit.edu

Homepage: http://alum.mit.edu/www/bklow

Prof. Bak Kong LOW obtained his BS and MS degrees in civil engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1979, and PhD degree from the University of California at Berkeley in 1985. He is a Fellow of the American Society of Civil Engineers since 2000.  Apart from his long teaching and research career in soil and rock engineering at the Nanyang Technological University (NTU) of Singapore, Prof. LOW also conducted research while on sabbatical leaves at HKUST in 1996, University of Texas at Austin in 1997, and the Norwegian Geotechnical Institute in 2006. His research interests include reliability-based design in geotechnical engineering, soil and rock slope stability, underground rock engineering, and engineering ground improvement. List of his publications can be found at http://www.ntu.edu.sg/home/cbklow/.

Content:

Reliability-based design (RBD) can overcome some limitations in the design approaches based on partial factors (e.g. Eurocode 7). This lecture will present practical procedures for reliability analysis in geotechnical engineering, and illustrate reliability-based design in the context of a shallow foundation, a clay slope with spatial variability, a laterally loaded pile requiring implicit numerical analysis, and an anchored sheet pile wall. The effects of parametric uncertainties and correlations on the estimated failure probability and the advantages of reliability-based design and how it can play a very useful role to complement the partial factors design approach will be discussed.