Natural Hazards Engineering Research Infrastructure At Uc San Diego: Large High Performance Outdoor Shake Table Facility

Abstract eng:
The Natural Hazards Engineering Research Infrastructure (NHERI) Experimental Facility at the University of California, San Diego, a National Science Foundation (NSF) sponsored 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. Research experiments performed at this facility will: i) enable large-scale investigations of the performance of structural, geotechnical and soil-foundation-structural systems under earthquake hazards, ii) generate landmark experimental data essential to advancing predictive seismic performance tools at the system level, iii) educate undergraduate, graduate, and K-12 students, as well as the general public, about natural disasters and iii) contribute towards the national need to develop effective technologies and policies to prevent natural hazards from becoming societal disasters. 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-foundationstructural systems, up to a weight of 20 MN. Two large soil boxes can be used in combination with the shake table to investigate the seismic behavior 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 highdefinition 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. This paper presents the technical and performance characteristics of the LHPOST. Some past landmark experiments performed at this facility will be presented as well as the impact of the research enabled through this facility on the next generation of seismic design codes and earthquake protective systems, and the earthquake engineering profession in general. The paper also discusses key research questions that can be addressed using the LHPOST and lead to potential breakthroughs in earthquake engineering.

• Export as: BibTeX | MARC | MARCXML | DC | EndNote | NLM | RefWorks
• Add to your basket