Wei Zhang

Assistant Professor

Civil and Environmental Engineering

Dr. Wei Zhang is an Assistant Professor with the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Connecticut. Before joining UConn, was a senior structural engineer in Technip USA Inc. after he obtained his Ph.D. degree in Civil Engineering from Louisiana State University (LSU). At Technip, he worked on design of offshore floating structures. His work at LSU mainly focused on fatigue damage assessment of bridges in traffic-wind combined environments including extreme hurricane wind events. Prior to Technip and LSU, his research and study in the National Key Laboratory for Civil Engineering at Tongji University, China mainly focused on fluid mechanics and wind engineering. His research interests include coupled dynamic system modeling and analysis, multi-scale damage prognosis for complex structures, wind engineering, coastal multi-hazards and engineering, structural reliability and risk analysis for complex infrastructures and systems. His research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, Connecticut Sea Grant, ConnDOT, Eversource, etc.

Systems Engineering Focus

Key Active Research Projects

• Fatigue damage prognosis for coastal infrastructures
• System-level modeling and analysis of complex infrastructure
• Resiliency of coastal community under multi-hazards

Future Directions

• Performance based design and analysis for complex infrastructures in human-natural systems
• Develop multi-scale fatigue damage prognosis framework for complex structural systems
• Interdependency modeling and analysis for complex infrastructures in system networks

Key Skills/Capabilities

• Research Specialties: coupled dynamic systems, fluid-structure interactions, performance-based design, risk and reliability analysis, multi-scale damage analysis, bridge aerodynamics, wind engineering.
• Modeling and numerical simulation capabilities:
  • ANSYS (Mechanical, FLUENT, AQWA), Abaqus;
  • MATLAB: Programming languages for programming, data analysis, numerical computation, simulation, and optimization

Google Scholar Profile

Wei Zhang