SEDS Research Seminar “Development of a Renewable Energy Storage System using Reinforced Concrete Foundations”
The Nazarbayev University School of Engineering and Digital Sciences invites you to the research seminar “Structural Response of Renewable Energy Storage Pile Foundations” by Dr. Dichuan Zhang, assistant professor, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, SEDS.
Registration by the link
Abstract:
A new renewable energy storage pile foundation system is being developed through an interdisciplinary research project. The proposed foundation system, traditionally used for transferring structure loads into the soil underground, is configured to store renewable energy generated from solar panels or windmills attached to building structures through the compressed air energy storage technology. The compressed air together with the structural loading can result in complicated stress conditions in the pile foundation. Thus it is essential to ensure the reliability,
safety and stability of the pile foundation.
The project involves three sub-disciplines in the Civil Engineering to develop a reliable construction material and to investigate the structural safety and geotechnical stability. In this seminar, the research efforts towards ensuring the structural safety of the pile foundation will be presented. The structural response of the pile foundation under
combined structural loads and compressed air pressure is investigated through extensive nonlinear finite element analyses. Different types of pile foundations including regular reinforced concrete piles, fiber reinforced concrete piles and steel-concrete composite piles were studied. Design recommendations were made for the renewable energy storage pile foundation.
About the Speaker:
Dr. Dichuan Zhang is an assistant professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Nazarbayev University, Kazakhstan. He holds a Ph.D. degree specialized in Structural Engineering from the University of Arizona. Dr. Zhang’s research focuses on improving safety and reliability for structures under extreme loads such as earthquakes, blasts and high air pressures using state-of-art analytical and experimental integrated research methods. Dr. Zhang’s research team has performed thousands of analytical simulations for structures using nonlinear dynamic methods, has conducted many structural material tests, and has been involved in the planning of several large scale structural experiments including two shake table tests and one hybrid test. Dr. Zhang has served as a correspondence member for the diaphragm seismic design issue team (IT6) of the Building Seismic Safety Council. The issue team has successfully incorporated his research work into the latest US seismic design code (ASCE-7 2016).
