UC Davis Plays Major Role in New Bio-Geotechnical Engineering Center

Bio-shock resistant: New center to apply biology to earthquakes, civil engineering

DAVIS, Calif.; Aug 11, 2015  – UC Davis, Arizona State University, New Mexico State University and the Georgia Institute of Technology have joined forces to create the Center for Bio-inspired and Bio-mediated Geotechnics (CBBG), to embrace and expand the rapidly emerging field of biogeotechnical engineering. The National Science Foundation (NSF) will support this new Engineering Research Center (ERC) with a five-year, $18.5 million grant: the nation’s largest single investment in geotechnical research.

Arizona State University will lead the CBBG, which will be directed by Edward Kavazanjian, a professor of civil engineering and senior scientist at ASU’s Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability. The UC Davis team will be headed by Jason DeJong, a geotechnical engineering professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering.

The CBBG will analyze the fundamental processes of natural biological systems, to develop an entirely new generation of ecologically friendly, cost-effective solutions for the development and rehabilitation of resilient and sustainable civil infrastructure systems. This will propel the U.S. into a leadership role in biogeotechnical engineering, enhancing national security by providing green and sustainable solutions to crucial infrastructure and resource development-related challenges.

“The point is to shift from the construction profession’s historically cement-heavy, brute-force approach to infrastructure, and replace it with optimized, efficient and sustainable solutions to geotechnical practice,” DeJong explains.

Tree root systems, as one example, are far more efficient soil stabilizers than the best man-made soil-reinforcing elements and foundations developed thus far. Ants are 100 times more energy-efficient than human tunneling technology, and ant excavations almost never collapse. CBBG researchers will build on Nature’s work in a variety of ways, from developing bio-based methods of strengthening soils to prevent erosion, enhance building foundations, and combat the soil liquefaction that results during strong earthquakes; to devising technologies that will match the subterranean earth-moving and stabilization capabilities of burrowing insects and small mammals.

Such breakthroughs will lead to the construction of resilient roads, bridges, dams, power plants, pipelines and buildings, along with more efficient and effective resource recovery operations.

DeJong has focused on such work for more than a decade: In 2006, his lab team published the first peer-reviewed journal article that demonstrated how bio-mediated processes could improve the solidification of loose sands: one of the key geotechnologies within this new ERC. “In many respects,” he explains, “the technical content of the Center proposal built heavily on the work performed by our UC Davis research group.”

The basis for the CBBG also derived heavily from “white papers” that emerged from international workshops co-led in 2007 and 2011 by DeJong and Kenichi Soga, a professor of civil engineering at the UK’s University of Cambridge. The gatherings were funded jointly by the NSF and the UK’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC).

“Both workshops assembled faculty and researchers in soil science, biology, microbiology, chemistry, engineering, civil engineering and environmental engineering,” DeJong recalls, “to brainstorm and envision what this field would look like, as it evolved.”

The new Center for Bio-inspired and Bio-mediated Geotechnics is the tangible result of such meticulous groundwork, and DeJong can’t wait to get started.

“The challenge — this is the whole purpose of the center — is for this work to be transformative, we must move it from the research lab to real-world industry practices. That’s where we’re at right now: Several ideas and technologies have matured during the past decade, and the goal is to use them in actual, full-scale private and/or government projects.”

To that end, the CBBG already has attracted more than a dozen industrial affiliates, including several geotechnical consultants and contractors that have long-term relationships with UC Davis, such as GEI Consultants, Geosyntec Consultants, Golder Associates, Arup and Hayward Baker.

Numerous agencies that manage large public infrastructure systems — such as the Port of Los Angeles, and the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power — also have agreed to collaborate with research and field-testing.

The CBBG’s comprehensive educational and diversity programs will include outreach to K-12, community college and four-year college undergraduates, in order to expose them to these next-gen scientific principles and engineering solutions. This, in turn, will enhance the university STEM pipeline with a diverse population of innovative and entrepreneurial students.

DeJong will take technical lead on numerous projects, and he’ll be joined by several UC Davis colleagues. “Alissa Kendall, in Civil and Environmental Engineering, will conduct environmental impact assessments, and lead a project to develop an overall framework to evaluate the sustainability of geotechnical practice. Tim Ginn, also in Civil and Environmental Engineering, is one of two people leading the predictive numerical simulations of the proposed full-scale projects, so we can design and optimize the success of field treatments.

“Doug Nelson, in Microbiology and Molecular Genetics, has been invaluable during the past decade, in terms of understanding how to harness and control the various biogeochemical processes. Moving forward, as we go from lab-scale into the field, Bruce Kutter and the centrifuges at our Center for Geotechnical Modeling will be essential to our progress.”

DeJong also values the involvement of additional campus units such as the Geotechnical Graduate Student Society (GGSS), which this past spring held its eighth annual “Round Table” open house event at the UC Davis Conference Center.

“The GGSS and the Center for Geotechnical Modeling were among the many important UC Davis links that helped win industry support for the Center for Bio-inspired and Bio-mediated Geotechnics,” he notes. “The very nature of a new multi-university NSF Engineering Research Center reflects the UC Davis culture of interdisciplinary work, which is part of the reason I joined the faculty here in 2005. On top of which, UC Davis has become a world leader in terms of sustainability, which is one of the CBBG’s founding guidelines.

“If our research work at the Center goes according to plan, we envision nothing less than a paradigm shift in our entire geotechnical infrastructure system.”

More info: Bio-shock resistant: New center to apply biology to earthquakes, civil engineering