NEES Permanently Instrumented Field Sites - UCSB Equipment Site Upgrade Proposal

University Of California-Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara CA

Investigators

Abstract

This award provides funding for University of California - Santa Barbara (UCSB) to purchase advanced instrumentation and do associated work for the George E. Brown, Jr. Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES) - Permanently Instrumented Field Sites at - Wildlife site in Garner Valley, that will be operated by NEES Consortium, Inc., as a national shared use facility during FY 2005 - FY 2014. This award provides funding for the necessary instrumentation to augment the field measurements to provide additional critical data for future analyses and compare it with the data from old site that has been instrumented since 1982.. This will address the major challenges outlined the 2003 National Research Council report entitled "Preventing Earthquake Disasters: The Grand Challenge in Earthquake Engineering Research - A Research Agenda for the Network for Earthquake Engineering." The instrumentation was selected with input from project advisory committee and includes: a fifth downhole accelerometer in the liquefiable layer in the downhole accelerometer array, replacing the analog instruments with modern instruments (two shallow episensor force-balance accelerometers) to allow telemetering of the data to NEESgrid, replacement of surface accelerometer and analog DAQ with K-2 system, and three electrically transduced piezometers to measure pore pressures. This augmented instrumentation will enable researchers to provide additional data to fully analyze response of the Wildlife sites to future earthquake shaking and to allow comparison and verification of future records with those recorded during 1987 Superstition Hills earthquake. This award is funded by the NSF NEES Major Research Equipment and Facilities Construction (MREFC) project and is a component of the National Earthquake Hazards Reduction Program (NEHRP).