Natural Hazards Engineering Research Infrastructure: Experimental Facility with Large Wave Flume and Directional Wave Basin

Oregon State University, Corvallis OR

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 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 award will support a NHERI Experimental Facility at Oregon State University with two major experimental resources, a large wave flume (LWF) and a directional wave basin (DWB), for conducting fundamental research to understand and reduce risks to civil infrastructure from windstorm surge and tsunami hazards. Hurricanes and other coastal windstorms are extreme hazards with elevated surge and waves, high winds, and intense rains that threaten near-coast structures and critical lifelines. A grand challenge in hurricane research is to understand the overland flow hazard and the subsequent loads and structural responses. Sustainable hurricane hazard mitigation strategies for resilient coastal communities will need to consider transformative natural and nature-based solutions, including the role of beaches, dunes, and coastal vegetation in mitigating coastal hazards. Tsunamis can be triggered by seismic events and landslides. A grand challenge in tsunami inundation research is to increase life safety and community resilience in the event of a near-field tsunami, where evacuation plans must be rapidly executed. Horizontal evacuation strategies must consider the maximum extent of the inundation to improve community planning and the location of critical facilities. Vertical evacuation strategies must consider design of structures to withstand both the strong ground motion of the earthquake followed quickly by the tsunami inundation forces, including debris effects. Sustainable tsunami mitigation strategies must consider the role of the coastal greenbelt, including beaches and dunes, in reducing the hazards of tsunami inundation. Research conducted at this facility could enable breakthrough discoveries that increase community resilience to coastal windstorms and tsunamis and provide new mitigation strategies that will increase system robustness and future adaptation strategies that will improve the rate of the post-disaster recovery. Both the LWF and the DWB can be used for the study of hydraulic-structure-sediment phenomena, such as tsunami and hurricane inundation dynamics in constructed and natural environments; tsunami and hurricane wave forces on near-coast civil infrastructure; and tsunami and hurricane surge interaction with sediments causing erosion and localized scour. The LWF and DWB are capable of generating long-period waves for tsunami research and short-crested waves for hurricane wave research. The LWF is a two-dimensional representation of the coast (looking directly out to sea), eliminating the complexity of longshore currents and wave direction, and allowing a cross-section of test specimens to be studied at a large scale. The LWF can allow geometric scaling from approximately 1:50 scale to model the roughness effects of the constructed and natural environments of a coastal community to 1:1 (prototype) scale to model wave-structure interaction of building subassemblies, native sediments for beaches and dunes, and live coastal vegetation. The DWB increases the system complexity to three dimensions by extending laterally. This is necessary when studying complex harbors and coastal communities, and when wave direction is important. The DWB generally requires a decrease in scale by a factor of five. In addition to these two resources, the facility will provide standard and state-of-the-art instrumentation to assess wave conditions, velocity, and response variables such as stress, strain, load, and sediment transport (scour and erosion). The facility will conduct two workshops for prospective users in year one and annual workshops in each subsequent year, and will host visiting scholars and Research Experiences for Undergraduate students.