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10th Forensic Engineering Congress

Seattle, Washington | –

Call for Abstracts

The goals of the Congress are to develop, improve, and promulgate best practices and procedures to reduce the number of failures; to demonstrate and promote the use of advanced technologies in forensic investigation, to disseminate information on civil infrastructure failures and their causes; to provide guidelines for conducting failure investigations, and to promote ethical conduct in forensic engineering.

The call for abstracts is closed. 

Congress Topics

Building Enclosure (roof, facades, foundation)

  • Performance and durability
  • Building science (water, air, thermal, vapor)
  • Energy performance and modeling
  • Architectural materials and products
  • Façade/structure interfaces and interaction
  • Innovations in façade and roof assessment
  • Adapting legacy facades to modern requirements

Building and Infrastructure Performance

  • Pipelines, dams, levees, and water, and wastewater treatment plants
  • Recreational facilities (arenas, stadiums, stages, tents, and theaters)
  • Special structures, including retaining walls, and temporary structures, tall buildings, schools, hospitals, data processing, warehouses
  • Transportation, including airports, bridges, highways, parking facilities, railroads, an, tunnels
  • Transmission towers and wind turbines

Natural Disasters and Extreme Conditions

  • Failures caused by tornadoes, hurricanes, flooding, earthquakes, tsunamis
  • Blast and impact loading
  • Fire
  • Risk management
  • Emergency response
  • Lifeline engineering

Technologies for Forensic Investigation

  • Emerging technologies i.e., machine learning, artificial intelligence (AI), and data science
  • Building information modeling (BIM)
  • Structural health monitoring
  • Remote sensing
  • Nondestructive testing
  • Sampling and statistical analysis

Forensic Engineering Education

  • Historical failures
  • Use of case studies in forensic engineering education
  • Teaching the investigation process
  • Forensic engineering course content

Construction Performance and Safety

  • Adjacent construction (damages, protection, shoring, and undermining)
  • Demolition and excavation (collapse and implosion)
  • Equipment (cranes and scaffolding)
  • Loads (instability, temporary, and construction loading)
  • Worker safety (OSHA)

Professional Practice in Forensic Engineering

  • Engineering ethics, codes of ethics, and case studies in ethics
  • Codes of ethics, conduct, and violations
  • Standard of care and engineering judgment
  • Conducting the right investigation for your client
  • Marketing a forensic engineering practice
  • Working with attorneys and insurance professionals

Repairs and Remediation

  • Structural repairs
  • Innovative approaches to repairs
  • Strengthening methods
  • Advanced construction materials and methods
  • Repair-induced problems

Washington Topics

  • Seismic retrofits
  • Earthquake damage assessments
  • Timber structural evaluations
  • Climate change and adaptions for engineering practice
  • Threshold inspections to reduce failures/water control layer failures
  • Bridge failures
  • Material issues - reactive aggregates in concrete/coating failures and corrosion of structural steel/establishing timber design values in older structures

Submission Requirements

You are invited to submit abstracts for technical papers, technical sessions, and panel discussions for the 10th Forensic Engineering Congress. Prospective authors, session organizers, and panelists are invited to submit a one-page abstract in English not to exceed 250 words, including a summary of the purpose, scope of investigation, problem statement, approach, results, and conclusions.

Abstracts for papers should include paper title, names, titles, credentials, and affiliations of authors and coauthors. The e-mail address of the primary author should be included. Any special comments, such as session, track, or topic for which the paper is best suited, should be entered at the bottom of the abstract page.

Abstracts for sessions should include the session title, names, titles, credentials, and affiliations of authors and coauthors along with the e-mail address of the session chair.

Abstracts for panel discussions should include the panel discussion title, names, titles, credentials, and affiliations of panelists along with the email address of the panel moderator.

Abstract Preparation. Abstracts must be submitted electronically before the deadline via the Congress abstract website.

Peer Review Process

Each abstract, paper, and session will be subjected to a confidential peer review, with review results distributed to authors. Each reviewer will provide a recommendation of either: “Accepted as Is,” “Accepted with Revisions and Re- Review,” or “Declined.” Final review will be made by the proceedings’ editors.

Abstract submissions require a minimum of acceptance from two peer reviewers before an invitation to submit full papers. Acceptance of an abstract constitutes an invitation to submit a full paper (maximum of 10 pages). Acceptance of an abstract is not an acceptance of the final paper for publication. The review criteria will assess whether each abstract and paper are applicable, useful, and relevant to forensic engineering and the performance of constructed facilities; whether the abstract and paper has been published previously; whether the methodology is satisfactorily explained; whether the references are verifiable, whether the tables, figures, and photographs complement the paper; whether the conclusions are clear and justified; whether the elements of the paper are logically related to the paper; and whether the writing style, grammar, and formatting are appropriate.

Rejection of abstracts or papers may occur if papers fail to comply with the submission requirements, are written as advertisements or for self-promotion, or are written without reference to scholastically verifiable data (i.e. propaganda).

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