Purdue to lead multihazard research with $4.1 million NSF award

10/6/2016 |

Purdue University has been awarded a five-year, $4.1 million grant by the National Science Foundation to help coordinate a national initiative aimed at minimizing damage to physical civil infrastructure.

A Purdue team led by civil engineering professor Julio Ramirez will direct the Network Coordination Office for the National Hazards Engineering Research Infrastructure effort by engineers and scientists to investigate methods for making civil infrastructure safer and making communities more resilient.

“Purdue was viewed as the most suitable institution to lead the community, coordinate the large investment of the NSF and to conduct education and community outreach activities of this research infrastructure,” Ramirez says.

From 2009 to 2014, Ramirez served as director for NSF’s George E. Brown Jr. Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation, a $105 million grant aimed at mitigating earthquake damage. The NHERI grant is multihazard, combining investigations from the earthquake, wind and coastal engineering and social sciences communities.

Along with the NCO, the NHERI network consists of eight experimental facilities, a cyberinfrastructure platform for collaboration and a simulation center – components located at universities around the country.

“The NHERI NCO will lead the engineering community into adopting sustainable multihazard approaches,” Ramirez says. “With NEES, our focus was earthquakes and associated natural hazards such as tsunamis and landslides. With NHERI, we focus on windstorms and associated hazards such as coastal storm surge and inundation, too. Things that we’ve learned in earthquake engineering can be applied to engineering for windstorms and vice versa.

Doctoral candidate Christian Silva tests a magneto-rheological damping system, which provides variable damping under earthquake loading. The work is part of Purdue civil engineering professor Shirley Dyke’s Intelligent Infrastructure Systems Lab in the Robert L. and Terry L. Bowen Laboratory for Large-Scale Civil Engineering Research. (Purdue University photo/Mark Simons) Download image

“Most importantly, we want engineers and scientists to become multihazard in their thinking, to approach resilience of communities as a whole.”

Other Purdue researchers on the NCO team are Antonio Bobet, professor of civil engineering, who brings extensive geotechnical engineering expertise; and David R. Johnson, assistant professor with joint appointments in political science and industrial engineering. Johnson has experience in interdisciplinary methods and scientific research to inform policymaking and social science research.

Above: Purdue civil engineering professors Antonio Bobet, at left, and Julio Ramirez are heading up the NHERI NCO, headquartered at Purdue. In the Robert L. and Terry L. Bowen Laboratory for Large-Scale Civil Engineering Research, researchers in the Intelligent Infrastructure Systems Lab use a technique called hybrid simulation to test large- and small-scale structures like the one shown. (Purdue University photo/Mark Simons)

– Marti LaChance, http://bit.ly/2dUVDoW