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Shane Underwood


Professor, Associate Head of Undergraduate Programs
Dept. of Civil, Construction, and Environmental Engineering
North Carolina State University

Contact information:
Shane.Underwood@ncsu.edu
Office: 3315A Fitts-Woolard Hall
Phone: 919.515.8632
Fax: 919.515.7908


Welcome


Welcome to the web page of Shane Underwood, Professor of Civil Enginering and Associate Head of Undergraduate Programs in the North Carolina State University Civil, Construction, and Environmental Engineering Department.

My expertise is in the field of pavements and materials, and my current research focuses on the use of bottom-up, constitutive model based investigations of asphalt concrete and its constituent materials and the use of top-down systems studies to identify needs and knowledge gaps that the bottom-up investigations can inform. My constitutive modeling strategies involve looking at the whole mass of asphalt concrete as an assemblage of different scales of materials rather than as a homogenous body. We follow this approach in order to better understand how the performance characteristics of materials are affected by local scale changes. By experimenting on different assemblages of materials, then developing models, I am working to gain a better understanding of the way the materials behave.

Through this technique, I am interested in looking at materials reported to be environmentally friendly to evaluate both the initial footprint, but also the long-term performance. The goal is to develop analysis of pavements that are truly sustainable in both the short-term and over the product lifecyle. Pavements specifically and transportation infrastructure more generally intimately affect our day-to-day lives. So much so in fact that other infrastructures systems exhibit significant dependency and interdependencies on the decisions that pavement engineers make. These dependencies often span decades or more and involve many contributing factors beyond simply the technical. Our systems research tries to elucidate these effects and my students and I work with collaborators from diverse backgrounds to better understand the complex technical and non-technical factors and quantify impacts.

Areas of interest


Modeling and study of construction materials

  • Mechanistic properties of Asphalt Concrete and Portland Cement Concrete

  • Mulitscale modeling methods

  • Continuum damage mechancis

  • Performance evaluation and simulations


Sustainably Built Infrastructure

  • Quantifying economic, environmental, and societal impacts of alternative infrastructure solutions

  • Adaptation strategies, their development and effectiveness

  • Decision making framework for identifying sustainable pavement solutions

  • Composite and perpetual pavements

  • Performance based pavement engineering

  • Emerging technologies and autonomous vehicle impacts


Sustainable pavement materials

  • Warm mix asphalt mixtures

  • Fiber reinforced asphalt concrete

  • Positive reuse of waste streams


Modeling the behavior and performance of pavements

  • Performance related and performance based specifications

  • Novel long-term structural response and prediction algorithms

  • Vehicle/Pavement/Environment interaction modeling

  • Performance assessment