About

Satish Nagarajaiah is a full professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Mechanical Engineering at Rice University, holding a joint appointment and also affiliated with the Material Science and Nano-Engineering Department. He has been a tenured professor since 2006 and obtained his Ph.D. from the State University of New York at Buffalo, where he also conducted post-doctoral research before beginning his academic career in 1993. His research focuses on structural dynamic systems, earthquake engineering, seismic isolation, structural control and monitoring, adaptive stiffness systems, smart tuned mass dampers, sparse structural system identification, low rank methods, and non-contact laser-based strain sensing using nanomaterials. Professor Nagarajaiah serves as an editor for the Structural Control Health Monitoring Journal and Structural Monitoring and Maintenance Journal, and has previously served as managing editor of the ASCE Journal of Structural Engineering. He is a fellow of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), the National Academy of Inventors (NAI), and an inaugural fellow of the Structural Engineering Institute (SEI) of ASCE. His professional service includes roles on the ASCE SEI Board of Governors, the Technical Activities Division Executive Committee, and leadership positions such as president of the U.S. panel on structural control & monitoring and founding chair of the ASCE-Engineering Mechanics Institute (EMI) structural health monitoring committee. Professor Nagarajaiah has published extensively, presented at international conferences, and has been quoted and interviewed by major media outlets including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, BBC, CNN, and others. His educational background includes a B.S. in Civil Engineering from Bangalore University, an M.S. in Structural Engineering from the Indian Institute of Science, and a Ph.D. in Structural Engineering from the State University of New York at Buffalo.

Research topics

• Structural engineering
• Computer Science
• Computer Security
• Artificial Intelligence
• Engineering
• Physics
• Data science
• Mathematics
• Mechanical engineering

Selected publications

• Nonstationary Stochastic Seismic Optimization of Base‐Isolated Nuclear Power Plant Equipped With Negative Stiffness Amplifying Damper Considering Dynamic Soil–Structure‐Interaction

  Earthquake Engineering & Structural Dynamics · 2026-02-24

  article

  ABSTRACT This paper proposes a nonstationary stochastic seismic optimization framework and investigates the performance enhancement of base‐isolated nuclear power plants (NPPs) equipped with negative stiffness amplifying dampers (NSADs), while explicitly accounting for dynamic soil–structure‐interaction (SSI). A practical configuration for the application of NSADs in base‐isolated NPP is presented, and the governing equations of motion incorporating NSAD and SSI effects are formulated. By integrating nonstationary seismic excitation with the dynamic representation of the isolated NPP, a time‐variant augmented system is established. A multi‐objective optimization framework is then developed to address the trade‐off between minimizing superstructure acceleration and base isolator drift. Numerical results for a 1000 MW pressurized water reactor demonstrate that the proposed NSAD system effectively reduces superstructure accelerations compared to the conventional base isolation (BI) design, owing to its negative stiffness feature. Meanwhile, base isolator drift is effectively controlled through the damping amplification mechanism of the NSAD, even with a significantly smaller damping demand. For the NPP model considered in this paper, SSI has pronounced influence on superstructure‐dominated mode particularly for containment structure of non‐isolated, base‐isolated, and NSAD‐enhanced NPPs, whereas its effect on the isolation‐dominated mode is negligible.

  PublisherDOI

• Liquid Sloshing Characteristics of the Cylindrical Storage Tank With Partitions and Wire Mesh Under Seismic Excitations

  Structural Control and Health Monitoring · 2026-01-01

  articleOpen access

  Liquid storage structures, typically designed with thin walls, are widely used in civil engineering, aerospace, and related fields, such as large LNG tanks, oil transport vessels, and fuel tanks. Liquid sloshing constitutes a critical determinant in the structural integrity assessment of liquid storage tanks, having been the main subject of extensive research in fluid‐structure interaction studies. To better understand the liquid sloshing characteristics of the storage tank, water pressure and wave height sensors were implemented in a shaking table test for quantitative hydrodynamic monitoring. The results show that liquid sloshing exhibits varying responses at different heights, with distinct differences in the time‐history curves of dynamic water pressure and frequency spectra between the bottom and top regions under different seismic wave excitations. The region near the upper liquid layer just below the free surface exhibits the maximum standard deviation and spectral amplitude of dynamic water pressure along the liquid height in the primary vibration direction, particularly under El Centro and Tianjin wave excitations. This indicates that the upper liquid near the free surface experiences larger fluctuations and intensified spectral energy accumulation under seismic excitations. Intense liquid sloshing poses a considerable risk to the stability and safety of these structures, particularly when subjected to external excitations. Such disturbances can lead to fluctuations in sloshing height and dynamic water pressure, which eventually jeopardize structural integrity. To address this challenge, a novel composite partition structure incorporating wire mesh is proposed to reduce these effects. Comparative analysis of parameters of dynamic water pressure, wavenumber, and standard deviation is conducted to compare following the implementation of the measures. Experimental results reveal that the partitions and wire mesh suppress liquid sloshing, effectively reducing the maximum wave height by 20%–50%. As the mesh spacing decreases, the damping effect is further enhanced, leading to greater sloshing suppression efficiency, but it amplifies localized high‐frequency disturbances. In addition, the results of the original tank were in excellent agreement with those from the three‐dimensional numerical simulation analysis.

  PublisherDOI

• Latching control: Experimental study on pendulum latched mass damper

  Engineering Structures · 2026-05-01

  articleOpen access
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Signal-based online acceleration and strain data fusion using B-splines and Kalman filter for full-field dynamic displacement estimation

  Mechanical Systems and Signal Processing · 2026-02-03 · 1 citations

  articleCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Dynamic Test of Negative Stiffness Damped Outrigger With Damping Amplification

  Earthquake Engineering & Structural Dynamics · 2025-01-08 · 30 citations

  articleOpen accessCorresponding

  ABSTRACT This paper proposed a novel negative stiffness damped outrigger with damping amplification (NSDO‐DA) through a smart combination of an L‐shape lever, a precompressed disc spring brace (DSB), and a viscous damper. A theoretical model of the NSDO‐DA considering nonlinear adaptive negative stiffness, damping amplification of nonlinear viscous dampers, and frictions were established. Cyclic tests of disc spring pairs and DSB were presented to verify the feasibility of using DSB as the precompression component of the NSDO‐DA. Subsequently, large‐scale dynamic tests of five different outrigger systems were conducted involving (i) conventional damped outrigger (CDO), (ii) amplified damped outrigger (ADO), (iii) purely negative stiffness mechanism, (iv) negative stiffness damped outrigger (NSDO), and (v) NSDO‐DA. Then, discussions on the dynamic test results and validations of the NSDO‐DA model were provided. The major contributions of this paper are the proposal of the NSDO‐DA and the experimental validation of its two special features: (i) producing negative stiffness force in the parallel direction of the precompression force rather than in the perpendicular direction, making the physical configuration more concise and condensed for outrigger application; (ii) sharing the amplification mechanism of the L‐shape lever for both the viscous damper and the negative stiffness mechanism, leading to an additional damping amplification mechanism for the damper. Moreover, the adaptive stiffness behavior and the frequency‐independent feature of the proposed negative stiffness mechanism were successfully validated by the dynamic tests.

  PublisherDOI

• Root-locus optimal formula for seismic control of multi-story structures equipped with tuned mass damper inerter enhanced by negative stiffness considering non-resonant mode contributions

  Journal of Building Engineering · 2025-02-24 · 6 citations

  articleCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Numerical Simulation Analysis of Large Lng Storage Tanks with Novel Seismic Mitigation Measures Based on Fluid-Structure Interaction

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Physics-informed AI and ML-based sparse system identification algorithm for discovery of PDE’s representing nonlinear dynamic systems

  Mechanical Systems and Signal Processing · 2025-08-26 · 1 citations

  articleSenior authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Dynamic response reduction of floating offshore renewable energy applications with a high-damping mooring system

  Ocean Engineering · 2025-02-18 · 2 citations

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Zeolites topology inspired multi-material-based 3D printing of porous composite structures with high resilience

  Progress in Additive Manufacturing · 2025-04-27 · 3 citations

  article
  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• NEESR-SG: Development of Next Generation Adaptive Seismic Protection Systems

  NSF · $1.6M · 2008–2013

Frequent coauthors

• Sriram Narasimhan

  48 shared

• A. M. Reinhorn

  University at Buffalo, State University of New York

  41 shared

• Meng Wang

  Kyoto Architecture University

  34 shared

• Yongchao Yang

  30 shared

• D. T. R. Pasala

  25 shared

• Michael C. Constantinou

  University at Buffalo, State University of New York

  24 shared

• R. Bruce Weisman

  Rice University

  23 shared

• Sergei M. Bachilo

  23 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Structural Engineering

  University at Buffalo, SUNY

  1990

• M. S. in Structural Engineering, Civil Engineering

  Indian Institute of Science Bangalore

  1982

• B.S. in Structural Engineering , Civil Engineering

  Bangalore University

  1980

Awards & honors

• Fellow of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE)
• Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors (NAI)
• Inaugural Fellow of Structural Engineering Institute (SEI) o…
• NSF CAREER Award