Arghavan Louhghalam

Assistant Professor
University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, Civil and Environmental Engineering

Featured Projects

Research and Background

To face the challenges such as climate change and spikes in greenhouse gas emissions, it is necessary to built frameworks for design and development of sustainable and resilient structural systems. Dr. Louhghalam's research integrates engineering mechanics, computational modeling, and novel techniques from stochastic analysis and data analytics, to investigate transportation infrastructures at both component and network level, and minimize their environmental impact. She develops frameworks that link structural and material scale characteristics to the network scale environmental impact. These methods are crucial for making sustainable design and maintenance decisions. Her research on quantitative engineering sustainability aims at development of mechanics-based, e.g., pavement-vehicle-interaction (PVI), models that quantify the carbon footprint of road transportation systems, and relate this footprint to the structural and surface characteristics of pavements, traffic and climatic conditions. The total GHG emission can be evaluated by integrating these models with Life Cycle Assessment tools. To devise fully integrated frameworks for sustainable development, the mechanistic models that we develop must be integrated with real world observations via data analytics. To achieve this goal, we use data available to different federal and state agencies such as the data base of Long Term Pavement Performance (LTPP) Program of FHWA and other available data bases. She also studies the durability of transportation structures with the aim of reducing maintenance cost and environmental impact. Durability of civil infrastructures depends on the properties of construction material as well as the design characteristics. One focus of Dr. Louhghalam's research is to study the impact of environmental stressors and thermo-chemo-mechanical evolutions across multiple scales on fracture, damage and durability of pavements. Recently, in collaboration with MIT, Dr. Louhghalam started to study the propagation of vibration energy from high-speed trains into the ballast and to investigate how this results in ballast fracture.