After carefully reviewing the following descriptions of each Experimental Facility participating in the REU program, please rank each in order from 1 to 10 with 1 being the site with which you most would like to participate and 10 being the site you would least want to participate. Then you will be asked to provide a brief description of why you choose to rank them in this order.
Florida International University Wall of Wind International Hurricane Research Center
The NHERI Wall of Wind (WOW) Experimental Facility (EF) at Florida International University (FIU) was funded by NSF to be a national facility that enables researchers to better understand wind effects on civil infrastructure systems and prevent wind hazards from becoming community disasters. The WOW EF is powered by a combined 12-fan system capable of repeatable testing in up to 157 mph wind speeds through its flow management system. The unique advantage of the WOW EF is multi-scale (full-scale to 1:400) and high Reynolds number simulation of the effects of wind and wind driven rain. This is accomplished using the twelve fans and a water spray system. In addition, the 16,000 sqft. fenced-off secure area enables researchers to perform destructive tests under up to category 5 Hurricane wind speds. The NHERI WOW EF offers users a wide range of equipment, instrumentation and experimental simulation protocols as well as a distinguished group of faculty staff and a well-trained team of technical and operations staff which allow for delivering world-class research.
The NHERI WOW EF provides the following experimental capabilities:
- High-speed holistic testing at multiple scales in simulated hurrican wind speeds up to and including Category 5 Hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson scale
- Wind-driven rain simulations to study water intrustion
- Full- and large-scale aerodynamic/aeroelastic testing in atmospheic boundary layer (ABL) flows at high Reynolds numbers
- Conventional boundary layer wind tunnel testing in flows with various exposures and with full turbulence spectrum
- Testing under extreme environments to develop innovative mitigation devices
- Destructive tests to study failure modes.
Visit fiu.designsafe-ci.org for more information on the Wall of Wind Experimental Facility.
Lehigh University Advanced Technology for Large Structural Systems (ATLSS) Engineering Research Center
The NHERI Lehigh Real-Time Multi-Directional (RTMD) Experimental Facility (EF) was funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to be a world-class, open-access facility that enables researchers to address key research questions associated with the challenge of community resilience. The Lehigh EF has a unique portfolio of equipment, instrumentation, infrastructure, testbeds, experimental simulation control protocols, and large-scale simulation and testing experience and know-how that does not exist elsewhere in the United States. The unique strength of the Lehigh EF is accurate, large-scale, multi-degree-of-freedom and multi-directional simulations of the effects of natural hazard events on civil infrastructure systems (i.e., buildings, bridges, industrial facilities, etc.) with potential soil-foundation effects.
The types of laboratory simulations and tests enabled by the Lehigh EF include:
- hybrid simulation (HS) which combines large-scale physical models with computer-based numerical simulation models
- geographically distributed hybrid simulation (DHS) which is a HS with physical models and/or numerical simulation models located at different sites
- real-time hybrid earthquake simulation (RTHS) which is a HS conducted at the actual time scale of the physical models
- geographically distributed real-time hybrid earthquake simulation which combines DHS and RTHS
- dynamic testing (DT) which loads large-scale physical models at real-time scales through predefined load histories
- quasi-static testing (QS) which loads large-scale physical models at slow rates through predefined load histories
Visit lehigh.designsafe-ci.org for more information on the ATLSS Engineering Research Center.
Oregon State University O.H. Hinsdale Wave Research Laboratory
The O.H. Hinsdale Wave Research Laboratory (HWRL), established at Oregon State University in 1972, is a state-of-the-art coastal engineering research and education center with two specialized large-scale resources for physical model testing of coastal systems subject to the action of tsunamis created by earthquakes and storm surge and waves created by wind storms. OSU was awarded an NSF grant to establish the Tsunami Experimental Facility at the HWRL as part of the Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES) program from 2000 to 2004, and operated the NEES Tsunami Facility from 2004 to 2014. Over the past 10 years, the HWRL received several major upgrades, including state-of the art instrumentation, a large-stroke piston-type wavemaker, and over 5,000 ft2 of new office and meeting space for staff and visiting researchers.
The NHERI Experimental Facility at Oregon State University, known as the NHERI Coastal Wave/Surge and Tsunami (NHERI CWST-EF), consist of two main resources to support a wide base of users: the Large Wave Flume (LWF) and the Directional Wave Basin (DWB). Both the flume and basin are capable of generating wind waves and tsunamis. The flume 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 directional wave basin (DWB) increases the system complexity to three dimensions by extending laterally. In addition to these two resources, the Experimental Facility provides 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 CWST-EF at Oregon State University supports the overall vision of the Natural Hazards Engineering Research Infrastructure (NHERI) program to increase the resilience of civil infrastructure and communities to coastal storms and tsunamis. 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 such as bridges, roads, power and communication, and water supplies. Tsunamis can be triggered by seismic events, including fault displacement and landslides, and also represent extreme hazards with rapid inundation and damage. An additional challenge related to tsunami waves is the relative short time for advanced warning and evacuation strategies, not to mention the scarcity of tsunami events and unfeasibility to predict an earthquake.
Visit oregonstate.designsafe-ci.org for more information on the O.H. Hinsdale Wave Research Laboratory
University of California, Berkeley Computational Modeling and Simulation Center (NHERI SimCenter)
Do you want to create software that helps scientists understand how earthquakes, tsunamis and hurricanes affect cities, helps engineers design better buildings and bridges, or helps cities plan for natural hazards? Do you enjoy coding? Do want to learn how to write software that runs in the cloud? Join us at the SimCenter this summer and take your programming skills to the next level. While in Berkeley, CA, youll be working with experts in software development and modeling to improve computational tools or educational resources to advance engineering for earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes and other natural hazards.
The SimCenter develops software and advances computer simulation as part of the NHERI program. Were writing new code to advance simulation capabilities and integrating exiting applications to move beyond loading scenarios of an individual building to enable simulation of regional response to multiple natural hazards. In the future, SimCenter software will enable modeling of multiple buildings, bridges and other infrastructure components in a region to natural hazard events as well as simulating the damage these structures sustain and the cost and time required for repair. Ultimately, the SimCenter software framework will enable engineers, and students like you, to make better models and learn about the societal impacts that windstorms, earthquakes, and tsunami pose to our cities. To realize this vision of simulation-enabled engineering, the SimCenter is also creating educational modules to teach students modeling techniques and simulation skills; these educational tools will help prepare students for research and professional practice.
UC Berkeley invites you to participate in SimCenter efforts to advance simulation for natural hazard engineering. Help us create apps your classmates will use to understand the impact of earthquake or wind loading. This summer, you could help evaluate and improve models that assess the economic impact of earthquake damage.
Visit the SimCenter page for more information.
University of California, Davis Center for Geotechnical Modeling (CGM)
The NHERI Equipment Facility at UC Davis is housed at the Center for Geotechnical Modeling (CGM). The CGM has a long history of providing users, both national and international, with access to world-class geotechnical centrifuge modeling facilities for research on the performance of soil and soil-structure systems affected by earthquake, wave, wind and storm surge loadings.
Geotechnical centrifuges enable the use of scale models to investigate nonlinear, stress-dependent responses of soil masses that are many times larger than is possible on the worlds largest 1-g shaking tables. The centerpiece of our facility is one of the largest centrifuges equipped with a shaking table in the world, which enables researchers to perform experiments with a holistic-level of complexity that is not possible with smaller scale centrifuges.
The experimental facilities at UC Davis include:
- a 9-m radius dynamic geotechnical centrifuge,
- a model preparation room for the 9-m radius centrifuge
- a 1-m radius dynamic geotechnical centrifuge
- a model preparation room for the 1-m radius centrifuge
- an electronics and calibration shop
- the Geotechnical Modeling Facility building
Visit the CGM website to learn more about the facility's people, history, and vision (cgm.engr.ucdavis.edu).
University of California, San Diego Large High Performance Outdoor Shake Table (LHPOST)
The NHERI@UC San Diego Experimental Facility provides a large, high performance, outdoor shake table (LHPOST) 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 tests extensively instrumented large- or full-scale structural, geotechnical, and soil-foundation-structural systems under extreme earthquake loads to help advance predictive seismic performance tools and to develop effective technologies and policies to prevent these natural hazard events from becoming societal disasters.
The LHPOST is composed of a steel platen that is 12.2 meters long by 7.6 meters wide and has performance characteristics that allow the accurate reproduction of near- and far-field earthquake ground motions. The facility can support testing of large structural, nonstructural, and geotechnical systems up to a weight of 20 MN. Two large soil boxes can be used in conjunction with the shake table to investigate the seismic response of soil-foundation-structural systems. Systems tested at the facility utilize extensive data acquisition and instrumentation capabilities, including a broad array of state-of-the-art sensors and high-definition video cameras, to support detailed monitoring of the system response. This shake table facility can provide the validation tests for retrofit methods, protective systems, the use of new materials, components, systems, and construction methods for disaster-resilient and sustainable civil infrastructure.
Students working at NHERI@UC San Diego will gain hands-on experience with innovative design methods, construction techniques, sensors used to measure structural response, and basic computational modeling strategies. Students will help with the planning, preparation, and/or execution of the large- to full-scale dynamic tests.
Visit ucsd.designsafe-ci.org for more information on the LHPOST facility.
University of Florida Powell Family Structures and Materials Laboratory
The University of Florida (UF) Natural Hazards Engineering Research Infrastructure (NHERI) Experimental Facility (EF) provides users access to one of the largest and most diverse suite of wind engineering experimental research infrastructure in the world and is housed within the Powell Family Structures and Materials Laboratory. The NHERI UF EF supports transformative wind hazard research through seamless integration of high-performance computing, skilled personnel, a culture of safety and collegiality, and state-of-the-art experimental resources. Located in one facility, the NHERI UF EF enables investigators to characterize loading on and dynamic response of a wide range of infrastructure in a large, reconfigurable boundary layer wind tunnel (BLWT) and conduct full-scale tests on large building systems with equipment capable of ultimate/collapse loads associated with a Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale Category 5 hurricane or an Enhanced Fujita Scale 5 tornado.
Visit ufl.designsafe-ci.org for more information on the Powell Family Structures and Materials Laboratory.
University of Texas at Austin Experimental equipment site specializing in dynamic in-situ testing using large-scale mobile shakers
The NHERI@UTexas facility houses five large-scale mobile shakers, often called shaker trucks, that are used for dynamic field testing of geotechnical or structural infrastructure. These shaker trucks can be used to determine subsurface soil conditions, to characterize the nonlinear behavior and liquefaction potential of soils that are difficult to sample and test in a lab, and to determine dynamic characteristics of existing bridges and buildings. Students working at NHERI@UTexas will gain hands-on experience with the sensors used to measure soil and structural vibrations and will learn how these sensor measurements are used in infrastructure and natural hazards engineering applications. Students will help with the planning, preparation, and/or execution of dynamic tests of infrastructure such as levees, buildings, or bridges.
Visit utexas.designsafe-ci.org for more information on the NHERI@UTexas facility.
University of Texas at Austin NHERI Cyberinfrastructure and Data Management
DesignSafe-ci.org provides a comprehensive environment for experimental, theoretical, and computational engineering and science, providing a place not only to steward data from its creation through archive, but also the workspace to understand, analyze, collaborate and publish that data.
The DesignSafe vision is an integral part of research and discovery, providing researchers access to cloud-based tools that support their work to analyze, visualize, and integrate diverse data types. DesignSafe will provides a flexible data repository with straightforward mechanisms for data/metadata upload and enables the next generation of research discovery through a cloud-based interface that allows data analysis and visualization tools to work directly on data stored in the data repository. These functionalities allow researchers to use the cyberinfrastructure to interact with their data in the cloud, bypassing time-consuming downloads/uploads. Software encompasses both data analytics and visualization tools (e.g. MATLAB, ParaView) as well as computational simulation tools (e.g. OpenSees, ABAQUS, ADCIRC, OpenFOAM). Student projects will focus on computational technologies to help support research analysis.
Visit the cyberinfrastructure page for more information.
University of Washington Rapid Response Research Facility
The NHERI post-disaster, rapid response research (or RAPID) facility will provide the infrastructure and services needed to enable natural hazard researchers to conduct next generation quick response research through the acquisition post-disaster data sets. These data will be used to characterize civil infrastructure performance under natural hazard loads, evaluation of the effectiveness of current and previous design methodologies, and understanding of socio-economic dynamics related to disasters. The RAPID facility plans to host REU students during the summer of 2017. Student projects will focus on the use of structure from motion photogrammetric tools and techniques and analysis of post-disaster datasets.
Visit rapid.designsafe-ci.org for more information on the RAPID program.
Having reviewed these Experimental Facility descriptions, please now rank them from 1 to 10 with 1 being the site with which you would most like to participate in the REU program and 10 being the site you would least like to participate. Following the rankings, please explain your reasoning for this order.
