Prof. MUHAMMET VEFA AKPINAR

Biography

Dr. Akpınar has worked as a professional engineering in Houston, Texas. He was involved in QC/QA issues on geotechnical and pavement fields.  Dr. Akpınar worked as a Post Doctoral Research Associate at Kansas State University.  He is a licensed Professional Engineer in Ohio and Texas states. 

Dr. Akpinar’s teaching and research interests focus primarily on pavement mechanics and advanced modeling, pavement interlayer systems, and nondestructive evaluation. He has been working on transportation  infrastructure instrumentation, full-scale accelerated testing, modeling of concrete and asphalt pavement response to tire loading, pavement fracture and modeling of pavement interface systems, accelerated pavement testing  and improvement of weak base layers with geocell cells. 

Dr. Akpınar has taught graduate and undergraduate courses in Transportation and Geotechnical Engineering fields. He has thought soil mechanics, transportation I-II, computer aided pavement road design, and statistics undergraduate courses and pavement design, stress-strain analyses in pavement roads, pavement drainage, soil mechanics for pavement roads, pavement friction graduate courses. 

He has been principal investigator on several major pavement instrumentation projects, including projects completed for the Turkish National Science Fundation, TUBİTAK, 106M423 where he developed a new device which can be used as pullout and as an full scale direct shear box especially for geogrid performans under pavement evaluation. 

He has a solid working relationship with the Turkish Highway General Office, TCK and has completed several major forensic investigation to identify causes of pavement failure. By combining advanced non-destructive testing results he has successfully identified problems with flexible pavements in Trabzon. He is currently assisting TCK with the implementation of the APT procedure into their project level pavement design system. 

MR. Akpinar’s more resent research has been involved with the design and development of the full-scale Accelerated Pavement Testing Facility at KTÜ. Currently he is principal investigator on the Accelerated Pavement Tesing Program which is the ony program available in Turkey and  one of the most compreshensive program in Europe. As part of this effort he is building pavement deterioration curves based on information stored in the Flexible Pavement Data Base. One important aspect of this system is the development and implementation of a mechanistic pavement design procedure for Turkish highways.  Mr. Akpınar has broad experience in implementing improved systems, developing the necessary training materials and conducting training schools. 

Another major area of research is in the development and implementation of Geocell technology. He has established a pressure gage, strain gage, and plate loading system that evaluates the bearing capacity of pavement layers reinforced with geocells. By performing bearing capacity tests combining advanced non-destructive testing results he has successfully identified problems with flexible pavements in Trabzon. He has been actively performing research to determine how aggregate gradation, nominal max. size of aggregate, temperature, frost action, and moisture influence the load carrying capabilities of Geocell geosynthetic materials with varying thickness. He try to incorporate the research findings into the design, construction, behavior, and performance of pavement systems.