Civil and Environmental Engineering

The Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering provided these comments concerning the CS&E Initiative:

• CS&E Initiative and Departmental Plans and Priorities. Computational methods development for modeling physical systems forms the backbone of much of the research being conducted by CEE faculty. CS&E-related activities in CEE may be roughly grouped into three categories: (i) modeling of transport phenomena, including environmental fluid dynamics, subsurface flow, and atmospheric mixing; (ii) modeling of chemical reactions in complex systems, including aqueous and atmospheric environments; and (iii) computational solid mechanics, including simulation of the response and failure of all types of structures and materials subjected to many kinds of loading. In all of these areas, it is essential to note that CEE faculty have historically been engaged in the development and implementation of novel computational methodology, and not merely in the use of existing codes. To the above list of three broad disciplines may be added the rapidly-evolving field of information technology as it relates to the collection and manipulation of data relevant to civil engineering systems. Examples include traffic flow data in large urban areas, and remotely sensed hydrologic data. Some, but by no means all, of these research activities are related to the ``classical'' pursuit of solving complex boundary value problems by computational means. Many involve the manipulation and visualization of large data sets associated with large-scale data collection, for example. The CEE faculty expect that CS&E-related research activities in the CEE Department will continue to broaden in scope in the future. Accordingly, sustaining an environment in which the CEE Department has the ability to add faculty members with CS&E-related backgrounds is considered to be of extremely high priority.
• Hiring. In the very recent past, Professor Ian King retired from the CEE Department, leaving a large disciplinary void in the area of computational fluid dynamics. The Department considers it to be of the highest priority that this void be filled as soon as possible. Professor King's replacement is envisioned to primarily focus on the construction of numerical, probably finite element-based, models for complex fluid flows. While this person would likely be a user of sophisticated visualization tools, the person would not necessarily be directly engaged in the creation of such tools. In the computational solid mechanics area, a search is presently under way to replace a recent departure at the junior level. Due to a number of retirements in recent years, the faculty in CEE actively engaged in this discipline are all quite young. A new senior faculty member to provide leadership is considered important. Historically, the CEE Department has been very strong in computational solid mechanics, and has made many widely known research contributions. On the UC Davis campus, the expertise in computational solid mechanics within CEE is of vital importance to a number of units outside the CEE Department, both in relation to teaching and research. Our list of Target-of-Excellence individuals includes Phil Gresho, LLNL (computational fluid dynamics); Mary Wheeler, UT Austin (subsurface and atmospheric transport); Clint Dawson, UT Austin ( transport phenomena); Tom Russelli, U. Colorado at Denver (transport phenomena); J. N. Reddy, Texas A&M (computational solid mechanics); and Brian Moran, Northwestern (computational solid mechanics). Our list of institutions includes UT Austin (computational solid and fluid mechanics), Northwestern (computational solid mechanics), Stanford (computational solid mechanics), Caltech (air quality modeling), and Carnegie Mellon (air quality modeling).
• CS&E and its Relation to Teaching. At the undergraduate level, many CEE course offerings have a strong presence of computational methods. For this reason, CEE undergraduates are required to take EAD 115. For some time, many CEE faculty have felt that we should be teaching one or more computational methods courses designed specifically for our needs. However, the pressures of covering the broad curriculum that we now teach has prevented us from making new course offerings of this kind. At the graduate level, the 212A-B-C series of courses, which cover the finite element method for both solid and fluid applications, usually have the largest enrollments of any graduate offerings in the CEE curriculum. In fact, students from many other departments in the College of Engineering as well as students from, e.g., Mathematics and Geology often take these courses. Additional CS&E-oriented faculty would be invaluable in enriching our offerings with other, more specialized courses that include, e.g., visualization and parallel computing.
• Resources. Depending on the individual, the area of expertise, and the circumstances, the CEE Department would be open to fostering collaborations with CS&E-oriented faculty. For example, a small fractional appointment (0.1 to 0.2 FTE) of one of our faculty with CS&E orientation with a CS&E unit, reciprocated with a small fractional appointment of a CS&E-faculty member in another area of interest to the Department can be envisioned. For example, if the computational solid mechanics search presently under way, the replacement of Ian King, or some future growth FTE in remote sensing yields an individual of interest to CS&E, and the Department desires some expertise to work on visualization or parallel computing, then an exchange of FTE may be possible. In the area of parallel computing, one of our faculty will be assembling a PC processor-based parallel computing platform that may ultimately have from 60 to 100 Pentium-type processors. A CS&E faculty with research interests in that type of computational environment could have the opportunity to collaborate in the use of this system when working on problems of common interest. Under these circumstances, the CEE Department would consider it desirable to distribute the costs of additional system development and support appropriately across all participants in the collaborative effort.