Prof. MUHAMMET VEFA AKPINAR

Biography

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

Prof.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. 

Prof.Dr. Akpınar has taught graduate and undergraduate courses in Transportation and Geotechnical Engineering fields. He has thought about 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 a principal investigator on several major pavement instrumentation projects, including projects completed for the Turkish National Science Foundation, TUBİTAK, 106M423 where he developed a new device that can be used as a pullout and as a full-scale direct shear box, especially for geogrid performance under pavement evaluation. 

Prof.Dr. has a solid working relationship with the Turkish Highway General Office, TCK, and has completed several major forensic investigations to identify the 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. 

Prof.Dr. Akpinar’s more recent research has been involved with the design and development of the full-scale Accelerated Pavement Testing Facility at KTÜ. Currently, he is the principal investigator of the Accelerated Pavement Testing Program which is the only program available in Turkey and one of the most comprehensive programs in Europe. As part of this effort, he is building pavement deterioration curves based on information stored in the Flexible Pavement DataBase. One important aspect of this system is the development and implementation of a mechanistic pavement design procedure for Turkish highways.  Prof.Dr. 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.