Eyitayo Ademola Opabola

Eyitayo's current research projects investigate: (a) how future building codes can address resilience, sustainability, and durability under extreme loading events and changing climate; (b) how multiple natural hazards interact and impact civil infrastructure systems and communities, especially marginalized communities; (c) innovative ideas on rehabilitation and adaptive reuse of buildings to meet net-zero goals. A brief overview of some ongoing projects are provided below.

Addressing resilience: The economic and environmental impacts associated with the demolition and long-term closure of modern buildings led to societal demands for improved design procedures to limit damage and shorten recovery time after earthquakes. We have developed a repairability-based design approach for structural systems. The proposed approach targets recovery-based performance objectives through component deformation design limits that are defined to ensure that structural components are repairable (i.e., the components have sufficient residual capacity to withstand future events without requiring safety-critical repair) after design-level events. The design philosophy is currently being adopted by design guidelines in the US and New Zealand.

Addressing sustainability: As part of meeting the net-zero carbon objectives, we need to optimize the life-cycle carbon emission of our structural systems. This entails the use of innovative construction materials, design optimization, and designing to limit damage in future extreme events. Our group is currently providing insights on how future codes can address sustainability challenges.

Addressing hazard interactions and climate risk: Climate change is increasing the occurrence rate, severity, and interdependencies of natural hazards. Modeling multi-hazard interactions and simulating multi-hazard scenarios to design and assess civil infrastructure systems is crucial. We have developed a probabilistic framework for simulating multi-hazard scenarios for civil infrastructure design and risk assessment. The framework efficiently characterizes the interrelationships and interdependencies between primary and secondary hazards using a series of occurrence models for the primary and secondary hazards and simulation-based approaches to generate the arrival times and features (e.g., severity) of all considered hazards over a defined space-time interval. Together with stakeholders, we are currently demonstrating how our framework can help decision-makers design and test efficient disaster mitigation and management policies.

Please feel free to reach out if you want to learn more about exciting projects in the group.