Raimondo Betti

PROFESSOR OF CIVIL ENGINEERING AND ENGINEERING MECHANICS

640 S.W. Mudd
Mail Code 4709

Tel(212) 854-6388
Fax(212) 854-6267

Raimondo Betti’s research focuses on the area of structural health monitoring, a crucial area for the safety, maintenance, and rehabilitation of our nation’s infrastructure system. His main interests range from the development of numerical algorithms for the identification of high-fidelity models of buildings and bridges to the development of methodologies for the assessment of the internal conditions of main cables of suspension bridges and for the estimation of their remaining strength. 

Research Interests

Structural health monitoring, system identification, damage assessment in civil infrastructure, deterioration mechanisms in main cables of suspension bridges.

In the area of structural system identification, Betti works in developing computer algorithms that use the recorded response of buildings and bridges to natural excitation (e.g. wind, earthquake, traffic) to determine numerical models of buildings and bridges that can be used either for future structural response prediction or for damage assessment. Today, modern buildings and bridges are built with a large number of built-in sensors that record the motion of the structures (e.g. acceleration, displacements) at various locations. Betti has developed a variety of novel techniques that analyze these data in order to obtain models that are representative of the actual conditions of the structure. By comparing models of the same structure corresponding to different times it is possible to locate and estimate the extent of structural damage, without this being visible to the naked eye.

In the area of condition assessment of main cables of suspension bridges, Betti has developed a multi-sensor network that can be installed in the interior of a main cable of a suspension bridge. These cables are made by tens of thousands of high-strength steel wires and are very difficult (and expensive) to inspect. The sensor network developed by Betti and his team measures environmental quantities like temperature and relative humidity, as well as corrosion rates at various depths in the cross section, and provides continuous monitoring of the cable conditions. By using these recorded data, Betti and his team have developed methodologies that are capable of estimating the remaining strength of such cables over many years of service.

Betti received a Laurea (Magna cum laude) in civil engineering from the Universita’ degli Studi di Roma, “La Sapienza” (Italy) in 1985 and a PhD in civil engineering from the University of Southern California, in 1991. He is a member of the American Society of Civil Engineers and serves on the Board of Governors of the International Association of Structural Control and Monitoring. He also serves as Expert Advisor for Bridge Monitoring and Cable Corrosion for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. 

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE

  • Chair of civil engineering and engineering mechanics, Columbia University, 2010-2013 
  • Professor of civil engineering and engineering mechanics, Columbia University, 2002- 
  • Associate professor of civil engineering and engineering mechanics, Columbia University, 1996– 2002 
  • Assistant professor of civil engineering and engineering mechanics, Columbia University, 1991– 1996 
 

PROFESSIONAL AFFILIATIONS

  • American Society of Civil Engineering (ASCE) 
  • International Association of Structural Control and Monitoring (IASCM) 
 

HONORS & AWARDS

  • National Young Investigator Award, NSF, 1994 
  • Research Award for Foreign Specialists, PWRI, Japan, 1997 
 

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

  • Mukhopadhyay, S., Lus, H., and Betti, R.: “Output-only structural identification with incomplete instrumentation and independence of measured information”, Earthquake Engineering and Structural Dynamics, Vol. 45, Issue 2, 2016, pp. 273-296. 
  • Sun, H., Waisman, H., and Betti, R.: “A sweeping window method for detection of flaws in a large structure using an explicit dynamic XFEM and absorbing boundary layers”, International Journal for Numerical Methods in Engineering, Vol. 105, 2016, pp. 1014-1040. 
  • Mukhopadhyay, S., Lus, H., and Betti, R.: “Probabilistic Structural Health Assessment with Identified Physical Parameters from Incomplete Measurements”, ASCE/ASME Journal of Risk and Uncertainty in Engineering Systems, DOI: 10.1061/AJRUA6.0000838, September 2015. 
  • Balsamo, L., and Betti, R.: “Structural Health Monitoring with Small Size Samples”, Journal of Structural Control and Health Monitoring, DOI: 10.1002/stc.1744, March 2015. 
  • Mukhopadhyay, S., Lus, H., and Betti, R.: “Structural Identification with Incomplete Instrumentation and Global Identifiability Requirements under Base Excitation”, Journal of Structural Control and Health Monitoring, Vol. 22, No. 7, 2015, pp. 1024-1047. 
  • Phan, M.Q., Vicario, F., Betti, R. and Longman, R.W.: “Output-Only Observer/Kalman Filter Identification (O3KID)”, Journal of Structural Control and Health Monitoring, Vol. 22, No. 5, 2015, pp. 847-872. 
  • Balsamo, L., Betti, R., and Beigi, H.: “A Structural Health Monitoring Strategy Using Cepstral Features”, Journal of Sound and Vibration, Vol. 333, 2014, pp. 4526-4542.
  • Montoya, A., Deodatis, G. Betti, R., and Waisman, H.: “A Physics Based Stochastic Model to Determine the Failure Load of Suspension Bridge Main Cables”, ASCE Journal of Computing in Civil Engineering, DOI: 10.1061/(ASCE)CP.1943-5487.0000393, 2014. 
  • Reggio, A., De Angelis, M. and Betti, R.: “A State-space Methodology to Identify Modal and Physical Parameters of Non-viscously Damped System”, Mechanical Systems and Signal Processing, Vol. 41, 2013, pp. 380-395. 
  • Sun, H., Lus, H., and Betti, R.: “Identification of Structural Models Using a Modified Artificial Bee Colony Algorithm”, Computers and Structures, Vol. 116, 2013, pp. 59-74. 
  • Hong, A.L., Betti, R. and Ubertini, F.: “A New Stochastic Subspace Approach for System Identification and Its Application to Long-Span Bridges”, ASCE Journal of Engineering Mechanics, Vol. 139, No. 6, 2013, pp. 724-736. 
  • Sloane, M.J., Betti, R., Hong, A.L., Marconi G. and Khazem, D.: “An Experimental Analysis of a Non- Destructive Corrosion Monitoring System for Main Cables of Suspension Bridges”, ASCE Journal of Bridge Engineering, Vol. 18, Issue 7, 2013, pp. 653-662. 
  • Mei, F., Noyan, I.C., Brugger, A., Betti, R., Clausen, B., Brown, D., and Sisneros, T.: “Neutron Diffraction Measurement of Stress Redistribution in Parallel Seven-wire Strands After Local Fracture”, SEM Journal of Experimental Mechanics, 2013, DOI: 10.1007/s11340-012-9621-5, published online May 24, 2012.