Dr. Abolmaali is a Tseng Huang Professor of structural and applied mechanics and the Chair of the Civil Engineering Department at the University of Texas at Arlington (UTA). He is the Founding Director of UT- Arlington Center for Structural Engineering Research and the Professor-in-Charge of the Structural Simulation Laboratory at UTA.
Professor Abolmaali has intensive research experience and ongoing research projects in computational structural engineering and full scale structural testing of civil, aerospace, and underground structural systems including research in fluid structure interaction problems. As a Principal Investigator, Dr. Abolmaali has secured over $30M in research and development funds from states, federal and private agencies. These funding agencies include but not limited to the National Science Foundation, departments of transportation, Federal Highway Administration, mega corporations, and others to conduct basic and applied research in structural engineering and mechanics.
Professor Abolmaali’s ongoing research projects focus on developing standard specifications for gravity and sewer pipeline systems through coupled nonlinear finite element algorithms and full-scale experimental testing to simulate the nonlinear behavior of structural pipes subjected to static and dynamic loadings up to collapse. Dr.
Dr. Abolmaali currently has over $4M grants in structural health monitoring of gravity and pressure pipe systems from state and federal funding agencies including Water Research Foundation.
Abolmaali’s research spectrum includes but not limited to: prediction of crack width, locations, initiation, and propagation in steel reinforced and fiber reinforced underground and super structures subjected to complex loading; prediction of plastic hinge formation and cracks propagation in ductile metal civil and aerospace structures by including cyclic plasticity algorithms; response prediction of thermoplastic underground and super structures with time dependent material properties; simulation of bio-mechanics fluid-membrane systems by using mixed finite element formulation; development of numerical algorithms for nonlinear solution of dynamic equation of motion.
Dr. Abolmaali has conducted several high profile failure investigation research projects for the National Transportation Safety Board examples of which are the Boston Tunnel collapse (Big Dig Tunnel), Minneapolis Bridge collapse, and Big Spring’s Nebraska Bridge collapse.
Dr. Abolmaali is the author and co-author of over 90 refereed technical journal papers and conference proceedings in structural pipes and finite element method. Dr. Abolmaali has given over 150 technical presentations nationally and internationally.