Soil Improvement Strategies to Mitigate Impact of Seismic Ground Failures (NEES-2009-0731)

<p><strong>Title: </strong>Soil Improvement Strategies to Mitigate Impact of Seismic Ground Failures via Novel Integration of Experiment and Simulation (NEES-2009-0731)</p> <p><strong>Year Of Curation: </strong>2014</p> <p><strong>Description: </strong>This award is an outcome of the National Science Foundation 07-506 program solicitation "George E. Brown, Jr. Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES) Research" competition. This project is led by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and includes a subaward to Valparaiso University. Seismically-induced ground failures are a pervasive and growing source of economic loss from earthquakes. Concurrently, the nation's growing infrastructure needs demand more and larger bridges with increased spans and traffic volumes, thus requiring the use of large, stiff foundations such as large diameter shaft groups or gravity caissons. When seismically-induced ground failures occur, these foundations must contend with large, but unknown lateral forces. A common solution is to conservatively remediate large blocks of soil susceptible to failure, which involves high construction costs, increased construction time, and greater environmental impacts. This project will evaluate novel ground improvement geometries, such as chevrons and arches, to "deflect" laterally moving soil thereby reducing: (1) lateral loads on large foundation elements; (2) ground improvement costs; and (3) time and environmental impacts. This will be accomplished via an innovative integration of centrifuge experiments (performed at the NEES equipment site at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute) and Self-Learning Simulations (SelfSim) using the Open System for Earthquake Engineering Simulation software. This integration is termed "Simulation-designed Experiment - Experiment-driven Simulation" (SDE-EDS).</p> <p><strong>Award: </strong>http://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0723697</p> <p><strong>PIs & CoPIs: </strong>Scott Olson, Youssef Hashash</p> <p><strong>Dates: </strong>September 01, 2007 - August 31, 2011</p> <p><strong>Organizations: </strong>University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, IL, United States</p> <p><strong>Facilities: </strong>Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY, United States</p> <p><strong>Sponsor: </strong>NSF - n/a - 0723697</p> <p><strong>Keywords: </strong>liquefaction, Lateral spreading, rigid foundations, Lateral forces</p> <p><strong>Publications:</strong> N/A</p> <nb:citations></nb:citations>