Travis Welt

Assistant Professor at the University of St. Thomas
Mr. Welt has spent his professional career working on projects ranging from single-family residential design to design of floating offshore production facilities, specifically focused on steel stiffened plate hull design. As a structural design engineer (Shell International Exploration and Production), he developed a risk-based inspection philosophy for the largest (upon installation) floating production facility in the Gulf of Mexico, and led many brownfield projects including subsea developments and flowline pull-ins (to existing floating production facilities). Mr. Welt’s research career has focused specifically on seismic behavior of reinforced concrete structural walls. Through large-scale experimentation, he has isolated inconsistencies with classical analytical models for confined concrete as compared with modern design, and influenced changes in the building code accordingly. Mr. Welt is a member of ACI 369 (Seismic Rehabilitation of Existing Concrete Frame Buildings) and ACI 374 (Performance-Based Design of Concrete Buildings), and is a registered Professional Engineer.