Natural Hazards Engineering Research Infrastructure: Experimental Facility with Boundary Layer Wind Tunnel, Wind Load and Dynamic Flow Simulators, and Pressure Loading Actuators

University Of Florida, Gainesville FL

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 minimize loss of life, damage, and economic loss. Information about NHERI resources will be available on 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 NHERI Experimental Facility, located at the University of Florida, broadly supports research for mitigating the impacts of extreme wind and rain events on civil infrastructure. This facility will provide users with access to a diverse suite of wind engineering experimental resources, including an atmospheric boundary layer wind tunnel and specialized testing devices, which can replicate damaging effects from tornadoes, thunderstorms, and hurricanes. These experimental resources will support research to understand the vulnerability of civil infrastructure to extreme windstorm events, refine computational tools to predict performance of civil infrastructure, and advance knowledge to improve building codes and standards. This research will aid broader resiliency efforts to safeguard hazard-prone communities from extreme weather. The facility will conduct annual user workshops and will host Research Experiences for Undergraduate students. Combined with a collocated high performance computing (HPC) cluster, this facility will offer the experimental and computational capacity, staffing, domain expertise, and end-to-end project services for users to conduct a range of wind engineering research. The experimental resources at this facility will enable the dynamic loads from extreme winds (hurricanes and tornadoes) to be properly characterized and applied to full-scale components and systems, with durations reflective of actual events. The facility will provide a flexible framework that offers repeatability and scalability and is adaptable to many wind hazard scenarios and infrastructure systems. The facility will include five experimental resources. The atmospheric boundary layer wind tunnel has a unique, self-tuning flow control system that dramatically improves the breadth of achievable flow. The multi-axis wind load simulator can create dynamic wind pressure (up to a Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale Category 5 hurricane or Enhanced Fujita Scale 5 tornado), uplift, and shear loads on full-scale specimens (up to seven meters by five meters). The facility also will provide a high-speed, dynamic flow simulator to simulate surface winds, and two pressure loading actuator systems to evaluate building component performance under dynamic wind loads. The computational power and ultra-high bandwidth of the HPC cluster will offer remote use, hybrid experiments, real-time analysis, automated back-up, curation and sharing of data, and seamless integration with the NHERI cyberinfrastructure. These capabilities will enable previously infeasible high-risk exploratory research and will open pathways to solve outstanding wind hazard issues associated with resilient infrastructure, lifelines, wind energy, and meteorology.