Link to Index Page

Professor Zdenek Pavel Bazant

See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zden%C4%9Bk_Ba%C5%BEant
http://www.ncsml.org/Oral-History/All-Interviews/20110928/157/Ba-ant-Zdenek.aspx?PF=True
http://www.scholars.northwestern.edu/expertPubs.asp?n=Zdenek+P+Bazant&u_id=133
http://www.matsci.northwestern.edu/faculty/zpb.html
http://www.csm.cz/en/z-p-bazant-prize-for-engineering-mechanics/

Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Northwestern University

McCormick Institute Professor and Walter P. Murphy Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Mechanical Engineering and Material Science and Engineering

Registration: Illinois Registered Structural Engineer (S.E.), since 1971
C.E. "Civil Engineer", Czech Technical University in Prague, Prague, Czech Republic, 1960
Ph.D. in Engineering Mechanics, Czechoslovak Academy of Science, Prague, Czech Republic, 1963
Postgraduate Diploma in Theoretical Physics, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic, 1966
Docent (habilitatis) in Concrete Structures, Czech Technical University in Prague, Prague, Czech Republic, 1967


Research Interest:
Mechanics of materials and structures and structural safety, with emphasis on the mechanics of fracture, damage and creep, size effects and scaling, impact, modeling, probabilistic mechanics, nano-mechanics, poromechanics and hygrothermal effects, and with applications to concrete, fiber composites, tough ceramics, rocks, soils, bone, snow and sea ice, bridges, tall buildings, aircraft, ships, nuclear structures.

Significant Recognition:
Timoshenko and Nadai Medals from ASME
von Karman and Newmark Medals from ASCE
Prager Medal from Society of Engineering Sciences and others

Significant Professional Service:
Past President of Society of Engineering Sciences, FraMCoS and ConCreep
Past Editor of ASCE J. of Engineering Mechanics
8 National Academy Memberships (NAS, NAE, AAAS, ...)


From: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

Zdenek Pavel Bazant (born December 10, 1937) is McCormick School Professor and Walter P. Murphy Professor of Civil Engineering and Materials Science in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Northwestern University's Robert R. McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science.

Born in Prague to a geotechnical engineering professor and a sociology Ph.D., and the grandson of a professor of structural mechanics and former university president, Bazant was the winner of the 1955 Mathematical Olympics. He studied civil engineering at Czech Technical University (CVUT), where he was first in his class. He was awarded the C.E. degree with the highest distinction in 1960. While working as a bridge engineer for the state consulting firm Dopravoprojekt in Prague, he studied for his Ph.D. in structural mechanics at the Czech Academy of Sciences, which he received in 1963. In his dissertation on concrete creep theory, he developed a new method to analyze fracturing and cracking in concrete structures. He went on to earn a postgraduate diploma in theoretical physics from Charles University in 1966 and attained docent (Associate Professor) habilitation in concrete structures from CVUT in 1967.

In 1966, he accepted a visiting research appointment at the Centre Experimental de Recherches et d’Études du Bâtiment et des Travaux Publics followed by appointments at University of Toronto and University of California, Berkeley. The Russian invasion that followed the Prague Spring convinced him to remain in the United States, and in 1969 he joined the Northwestern faculty as Associate Professor of Civil Engineering. He was promoted to Professor in 1973.

Bazant, who is generally regarded as the world leader in research on scaling in the mechanics of solids, has published over 450 refereed journal articles and is the author of six books. He is an ISI highly cited researcher in Engineering, which places him among the 250 most cited authors in all engineering fields worldwide. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1996, the National Academy of Sciences in 2002, Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2008, and is a registered Structural Engineer in the state of Illinois. He has supervised 60 Ph.D.s in addition to receiving six honorary doctorates of his own (CVUT 1991, TU Karlsruhe 1997, CU Boulder 2000, Politecnico di Milano 2001, INSA Lyon 2004, and TU Vienna 2005).

Bazant's research entered the public sphere when, in the days after the attack on the World Trade Center, he circulated a structural analysis of the WTC 1 and 2 collapse. A later related paper provides a comprehensive analysis of the mechanics of progressive collapse in tall buildings.

Bazant's analysis led him to a four-point failure scenario.

1. Severed and significantly deflected columns at the point of impact redistributed stress to other columns, exhausting their load capacity.
2. Because insulation was stripped from many structural steel members, the jet-fuel induced inferno heated remaining columns up to 600 deg.C, causing them to lose up to 85% of their strength.
3. Heat and stress combined to induce both viscous and plastic properties in the remaining columns. That, and thermal expansion, caused the floor trusses to sag, pulling perimeter columns inward. These factors along with the deflection of some columns due to aircraft impact induced multistory buckling of the outer frame wall tube.
4. As a result of the buckling of the outer frame, the upper part of the tower fell through at least one floor height. The kinetic energy of the falling upper part exceeded by an order of magnitude the energy that could be absorbed by the floor below, triggering progressive collapse.

Bazant speaks English, Czech, French, German, and Russian.

Page 114 / 462