Strong as steel: Jayme Schiff helps improve Illinois bridges

As a child, Jayme Schiff enjoyed working with math, science and construction activities.

“I chose engineering because I’ve always liked solving problems, building things and seeing the final product,” said Schiff, who holds a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering from North Dakota State University.

Having grown up and attended college in North Dakota, Schiff was excited to move to the — relatively — warmer climate of Illinois to work for the Illinois Department of Transportation where he’s worked for the last 26 years.

Schiff serves as the bridge design section chief, but he’s also the technical review panel chair for the Illinois Center for Transportation and IDOT’s joint leading transportation research projects.

As a TRP chair, Schiff “enjoys the opportunity to work with other people outside of our bureau and outside of the department.”

Schiff recently collaborated on ICT-IDOT project “R27-SP35: Behavior of Epoxy Coated Textured Reinforcement Bars” with University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering Professor Bassem Andrawes, who served as the principal investigator, and graduate student researcher Kun-Ho Eugene Kim.

This project put epoxy-coated textured reinforcement bars — covered steel bars to prevent corrosion — to the test in an attempt to reduce cracking on bridge decks. Reinforcement bars provide tensile strength to the bridge deck and are used with concrete to increase the life cycle of bridges in Illinois.

With Schiff and the researchers’ efforts, the project was able to accomplish just that.

“The results show that it did have some promise and that it could potentially reduce the cracking in bridge decks,” Schiff said, “but we felt that there was more research that was needed.”

Schiff currently serves as TRP chair in a second phase of the ICT-IDOT project, “R27-197: Characterization of the Bond Strength of Textured Epoxy-Coated (TEC) Reinforcement Bars,” with Andrawes as the PI. In the follow-up effort, researchers aim to modify the texture on the reinforcement bars to determine if manufacturing the bars would impact the results, since multiple manufacturers could likely produce the textured reinforcements.

“The research could help get a more durable product and increase life cycles of our bridges, and that’s ultimately getting a better product for the taxpayers,” Schiff said.

The estimated completion date for the second phase of the project is January 2021.