Natural Hazards Engineering Research Infrastructure: Experimental Facility with Large, High Performance, Outdoor Shake Table

University Of California-San Diego, La Jolla CA

Investigators

Abstract

The Natural Hazards Engineering Research Infrastructure (NHERI) will be supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) as a distributed, multi-user national facility that will provide the natural hazards research community with access to research infrastructure that will include earthquake and wind engineering experimental facilities, cyberinfrastructure, computational modeling and simulation tools, and research data, as well as education and community outreach activities. NHERI will be comprised of separate awards for a Network Coordination Office, Cyberinfrastructure, Computational Modeling and Simulation Center, and Experimental Facilities, including a post-disaster, rapid response research facility. Awards made for NHERI will contribute to NSF's role in the National Earthquake Hazards Reduction Program (NEHRP) and the National Windstorm Impact Reduction Program. NHERI continues NSF's emphasis on earthquake engineering research infrastructure previously supported under the George E. Brown, Jr. Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation as part of NEHRP, but now broadens that support to include wind engineering research infrastructure. NHERI has the broad goal of supporting research that will improve the resilience and sustainability of civil infrastructure, such as buildings and other structures, underground structures, levees, and critical lifelines, against the natural hazards of earthquakes and windstorms, in order to reduce loss of life, damage, and economic loss. Information about NHERI resources will be available at the DesignSafe-ci.org web portal. NHERI Experimental Facilities will provide access to their experimental resources, user services, and data management infrastructure for NSF-supported research and education awards. This award will provide a NHERI Experimental Facility with a large, high performance, outdoor shake table (LHPOST), located at the University of California, San Diego, to support research in structural and geotechnical earthquake engineering. Earthquakes have had considerable destructive effects on society in terms of human casualties, property and infrastructure damage, and economic losses. Building a multi-hazard, disaster-resilient, and sustainable environment requires the understanding and ability to predict more reliably the system-level response of buildings, critical facilities, lifelines, and other civil infrastructure systems to these extreme events. This facility will enable research, with extensively instrumented large- or full-scale structural, geotechnical, and soil-foundation-structural systems tested under extreme earthquake loads, to produce the experimental data essential to advancing predictive seismic performance tools. Research experiments performed at this facility, which will provide life-size investigation of the performance of structural, geotechnical and soil-foundation-structural systems under earthquake hazards, will also educate undergraduate, graduate, and K-12 students, as well as the general public, about natural disasters and the national need to develop effective technologies and policies to prevent these natural hazard events from becoming societal disasters. This facility will conduct annual workshops for prospective users and will host Research Experiences for Undergraduate students. The LHPOST, with a steel platen that is 12.2 meters long by 7.6 meters wide, has performance characteristics that allow the accurate reproduction of near- and far-field earthquake ground motions. The facility will support seismic testing, under near real-world conditions, of large structural, nonstructural, geotechnical, and geostructural systems, as well as soil-foundation-structural systems, up to a weight of 20 meganewton. Two large soil boxes can be used in conjunction with the shake table to investigate the seismic response of soil-foundation-structural systems. Software and hardware are available to support hybrid shake table testing of structural and soil-foundation-structural systems. Systems tested at the facility can utilize extensive data acquisition and instrumentation capabilities, including a broad array of state-of-the-art and advanced analog sensors and high-definition video cameras, to support detailed monitoring, through hundreds of data channels, of the system response. The landmark system-level tests performed using this facility will provide fundamental knowledge and data to support the development, calibration, and validation of high-fidelity, physics-based computational models of structural, geotechnical, and soil-foundation-structural systems that will progressively shift the current reliance on physical testing to model-based simulation for the seismic design and performance assessment of civil infrastructure systems. These simulation tools will directly benefit the full realization of performance-based design to evaluate and reduce the risks of the built environment to natural hazards. This shake table facility can provide the validation tests for retrofit methods, protective systems, and the use of new materials, components, systems, and construction methods for disaster-resilient and sustainable civil infrastructure.