Dr. Duron is an expert in the full-scale field testing of large structures. He has headed more than 60 field tests on a variety of structures, including concrete dams, buildings, bridges, tunnels, and launch vehicles. He is a leader in the development of field-test procedures aimed at identifying response characteristics from low-level ambient vibrations that occur naturally in all structures. Dr. Duron has also developed highly sensitive instrumentation for monitoring hydrodynamic pressure wave propagation for use in seismic investigations of concrete dams. His innovations in both test procedures and instrumentation have resulted in the establishment of one of the largest databases for measured response information for dams in the U.S. and in Canada. He has given numerous invited talks on the subject of his research, and has also served on review panels for ongoing research programs funded by the Federal Highway Administration, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and the US Army Corps of Engineers. Dr. Duron led a team of researchers in the development of an early warning system altering firefighters to impending structural collapse and has also developed diagnostic field test procedures and numerical model analyses to evaluate energy absorption behavior in large suspension cable bridges. This work led to the development of Performance Based Testing and Analysis techniques for large concrete dams, and he currently acts as an advisor to dam owners including Tacoma Power, and the Department of Water Resources. Dr. Duron has served on the California Council on Science and Technology, established by the Legislature to provide advice and solutions to science and technology related public policy issues.
His work has been funded by a number of national and international organizations and has acted as a consultant to various organizations including Grant County Public Utility District, East Bay Municipal Utility District, Puget Sound Energy, Seattle City Light, San Diego County Water Authority, Denver Water, British Columbia Hydro and Power, Hydro Quebec, Caltrans, Gannett Fleming, HDR Engineering, AECOM, Shannon&Wilson, Montgomery Watson Harza, and Stantec. His work has been published in The Journal of Dam Engineering, HydroReview Magazine, Experimental Technique, The Journal of Sound and Vibration, The International Journal on Hydro Power and Dams, and the Journal of Structural Dynamics and Earthquake Engineering. Dr. Duron holds four patents.
Modern computational and modeling techniques offer powerful tools for evaluating the ability of large civil structural systems to withstand extreme and hazard loading conditions. Unfortunately, for many owners and operators of these large systems, a confidence gap exists between practical everyday operations and predictions of imminent failure. This talk will discuss reasons for why this gap exists, the state of the current practice, and offer an alternate or different approach that may begin to close this gap. A case study involving a large concrete dam will be presented in hopes of demonstrating how current practice may benefit from a performance based approach.