CEES Students Receive 2021 Dissertation Award

Trevor Looney and Alejandra Hernández-Santana, both doctoral candidates in the OU School of Civil Engineering and Environmental Science, have each received a Gallogly College of Engineering Dissertation Excellence Award, an award created to encourage doctoral students to graduate with excellence.  

Looney works with ultra-high performance concrete (UHPC) and has published three papers related to its mix development and use in bridges as a repair material. For his dissertation, he developed a novel apparatus capable of testing materials in various multiaxial tensile stress states under the direction of Jeffery Volz, Ph.D., a CEES professor and director of the Donald G. Fears Structural Engineering Laboratory. 

The novel apparatus allows Looney to collect new tensile strength data for the non-proprietary UHPC he helped develop at OU. He uses the data combined with test data from other researchers to develop a full multiaxial failure surface for UHPC.

Alejandra Hernández-Santana’s dissertation is titled “The Role of Iron-Reducing Bacteria in the Corrosion of Carbon Steel.” Bacteria accelerates the corrosion of metallic substrates and is a costly phenomenon that is poorly understood, she says. 

“I investigated how iron-reducing bacteria accelerate the corrosion of carbon steel, one of the metallic materials most widely used in the world. We also discovered that iron-reducing bacteria accelerate the corrosion of carbon steel through several mechanisms," she said. The mechanisms are removal of the iron oxide passivating layer, direct electron uptake and hydrogen consumption.

“Understanding how bacteria interacts with metallic substrates will help us to develop effective corrosion and prevention strategies and at the same time that provides the foundation for the development of microbial electrochemical technologies that use bacteria as catalysts for the conversion of oxidized molecules,” Hernández-Santana said. Her doctoral adviser is Mark Nanny, Ph.D., a CEES professor and faculty member in the OU Institute for Energy and the Environment. 

To learn more about all seven award recipients and their research, click here.