Geotechnical Engineering & Geomechanics

What is the Center for Infrastructure, Energy, and Space Testing at CU Boulder?

Anonymous — Tue, 24 Jan 2023 20:36:22 +0000

What is the Center for Infrastructure, Energy, and Space Testing at CU Boulder? Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 01/24/2023 - 13:36

Jeff Zehnder

Welcome to the Center for Infrastructure, Energy, and Space Testing (CIEST) at CU Boulder, an experimental facility offering geotechnical centrifuges, structural dynamics and materials testing and research for business, government, and academic partners.

CIEST is home to a massive array of cutting edge, specialized facilities to conduct small and large scale testing with equipment, testbeds and instrumentation unrivaled in the United States.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xlyBN4IJlK8]

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Video: Pioneering resilient infrastructure in the wake of earthquakes and climate-related natural disasters

Anonymous — Mon, 27 Jun 2022 15:14:15 +0000

Video: Pioneering resilient infrastructure in the wake of earthquakes and climate-related natural disasters Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 06/27/2022 - 09:14

Engineering a sustainable and equitable future takes innovation and collaboration.

Shideh Dashti is the Acting Associate Dean of Research at CU Boulder's College of Engineering & Applied Science, as well as an Associate Professor in the Civil, Environmental and Architectural Engineering Department.

Dean Dashti's research is specifically focused on geotechnical engineering, centrifuge modeling, and designing resilient infrastructure in the wake of earthquakes and climate-related natural disasters.

Shideh is also a Co-Director of the College's Center for Infrastructure, Energy and Space Testing (CIEST), as well as the Director RISE - an interdisciplinary research collaboration at CU Boulder to explore the intersection of resilient infrastructure, sustainability, and equity.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUww6HOz8A8]

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Engineers deploy drones to survey Marshall Fire, gather lessons for future disasters

Anonymous — Mon, 14 Feb 2022 16:09:41 +0000

Engineers deploy drones to survey Marshall Fire, gather lessons for future disasters Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 02/14/2022 - 09:09

The drone whirs to life on a driveway in the Spanish Hills neighborhood of Boulder County. Its four spinning motors lift it to nearly 200 feet above the ground. Below, the cul-de-sac comes into view, revealing the stone chimneys and blackened foundations that dot the hillside—what remains of many of the houses in this neighborhood after flames swept through on Dec. 30 and into the morning of Dec. 31 during what would become known as the Marshall Fire.

Brad Wham trudges through the snow to join about a dozen other researchers who have gathered to watch the flight this morning. They’re wearing hard hats and neon safety vests. As an engineer at CU Boulder, Wham studies how water pipelines and other “lifelines” can maintain their functionality during natural hazards, such as earthquakes and wildfires. He also lives in Louisville, Colorado, and had to evacuate his own home on that same day.

“I’ve deployed to Japan and New Zealand to study disasters very shortly after they occurred,” said Wham, an assistant research professor in the Department of Civil, Environmental and Architectural Engineering (CEAE). “It has been a different experience to have them happen in my hometown.”

The Marshall Fire, which spread throughout much of Boulder County including the towns of Superior and Louisville, became the most destructive fire in Colorado’s history. More than 1,000 homes were lost, and approximately 6,000 acres burned. One person remains missing while another was confirmed dead.

In coordination with local officials, Wham and his colleagues from Oregon State and Purdue universities have been surveying the damage since first-responders extinguished the flames. The effort is part an initiative funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) called Geotechnical Extreme Events Reconnaissance (GEER), which deploys researchers to disaster sites around the world. The team hopes to better understand the disaster from a uniquely engineering perspective: Why did some houses burn, for example, while neighboring homes survived? How did critical services like water, gas and electricity hold up during one of the worst disasters in Boulder County’s history?

Time is of the essence. Soon, bulldozers and excavators will crawl through the impacted areas to begin the slow process of rebuilding—and much of that information will be gone forever.

“I think that what we’re doing here is going to be beneficial in the future, especially with other communities that are going to have fires,” said Jessica Ramos, a senior at CU Boulder who’s working on Wham’s research team.

The Marshall Fire swept through this cul-de-sac in the Spanish Hills neighborhood. (Credit: Casey Cass/CU Boulder)

Heat map

More information

For CU Boulder community members experiencing physical, financial or emotional impacts of the Marshall Fire, CU Boulder fire resources are available.

Fire resources

CONVERGE is hosting a series of virtual forums to discuss research on the Marshall Fire. Tune in for the next forum on Thursday, Feb. 17 from 2-3:00 p.m. Mountain Time.

Join the forum

Erica Fischer, a structural engineering professor at Oregon State University who leads the GEER team along with Wham, joined the researchers in Spanish Hills on this windy morning in January.

In many ways, the neighborhood shows why people have flocked to Boulder County in recent decades. Its rolling hills offer a startling view of the CU Boulder campus and the Flatirons beyond. But, Fischer notes, wildfires have been an inescapable part of these kinds of beautiful landscapes since long before humans settled here—and, as the climate warms in Colorado, they’re likely to grow worse.

“I would love to have this view,” she says, standing on a snowy hillside. “This is incredible, but beautiful scenery is created out of disaster. That’s how mountains are formed. That’s how lush forests are created. Understanding that is important.”

She and her colleagues are hoping to help people to live more safely within this dynamic environment.

They’re taking a multi-pronged approach to the research. They’ve utilized laser sensors to create 3D models of homes and retaining structures burned in the fire. They’ve also deployed flying vehicles like the quadcopter drones—on loan from the NSF-funded RAPID facility at the University of Washington.

This kind of interdisciplinary reconnaissance related to a wildfire has never been done before by GEER,” said Shideh Dashti, an associate professor in CEAE who leads an interdisciplinary research effort at CU Boulder called Resilient Infrastructure with Sustainability and Equity. “The solutions we come up with need to be holistic.”

As one part of that fast-moving effort, the group is working to recreate a heat map of the path the fire took through towns like Superior and Louisville.

Fischer explained that as concrete heats up, it changes color, turning pinker the warmer it becomes. Students from Oregon and CU Boulder are inspecting the foundations of homes in the region, using custom-made color swatches to try to estimate how hot the flames got—giving them a better sense of what happened inside those homes as they burned.

Members of the GEER team watch a drone take off from the Spanish Hills neighborhood. (Credit: Casey Cass/CU Boulder)

Team members survey damage from the Marshall Fire. (Credit: Casey Cass/CU Boulder)

The team plans to publish its initial findings through a publicly-available report in March.

Ultimately, the researchers hope to bring together lessons learned from the Marshall Fire for other communities across the West. Fischer noted that recommendations like the International Wildland-Urban Interface Code and the National Fire Protection Agency's FireWise Program have long laid out how homeowners can safeguard homes from wildfires. Building a gravel skirt around your house, for example, can help to buffer it from flames. But many of those recommendations are expensive to put into place, she said, and no one knows which ones give you the biggest bang for your buck.

“In 2018, there was a big hailstorm in Boulder County. A lot of people replaced their roofs. Did certain roofing materials help more than others? Did some siding materials help more than others?” Fischer said. “If homeowners have one dollar for rebuilding, where should they put it?”

Urgent response

Wham understands the urgency of the effort. At 2 p.m. on Dec. 30, he packed a bag and left his house in Louisville as flames licked the ground just a couple hundred yards away. His house made it through the night, but many others nearby didn’t.

“The fire destroyed structures all around us, to the north, the west, the south,” he said from Spanish Hills, a mile and a half from his home. “But the response is the same as if it were in another community. We want to help in any way that we can. We want to support the local institutions that are making decisions to get people back to their homes and recover from this as safely and as efficiently as possible.”

As part of that, Wham and his colleagues are also striving to understand how humans responded to this unprecedented disaster. The team has interviewed emergency management personnel and other local leaders to learn more about the decisions they made during and after the fire—how did residents evacuate neighborhoods, and how did cities and the county prioritize restoring vital services? In Louisville, for example, the local water treatment plant lost power, natural gas and communication services during the fire, severely limiting its capacity to get water to firefighters. Local officials trucked in natural gas from the surrounding area to restore the facility’s critical water pressure demands.

Lori Peek is a sociologist who directs the Natural Hazards Center at CU Boulder and an associated NSF-funded effort called CONVERGE, which coordinates research on natural disasters. She has a lot of experience collecting perishable data in the immediate aftermath of events from 9/11 to Hurricane Katrina and the 2010 BP oil spill.

“One of the keys to doing ethical disaster research is making sure that work is grounded in the local cultural context,” Peek said. “This team multi-disciplinary team of engineers had those deep ties and has the opportunity to do grounded research that makes a scientific contribution but is also immediately useful to local leaders.”

Wham, for his part, has already taken one big lesson away from the Marshall Fire.

“People from all over the state and even from outside the state came in to fight the fires and help restore water service and power systems,” he said. “Those are really important relationships and connections that support the recovery process.”

He hopes that same wider community will help residents of the impacted neighborhoods as they begin the slow process of rebuilding their homes and their lives.

Other participants in the GEER study include CU Boulder professors Abbie Liel and Amy Javernick-Will of CEAE and Andrew Whelton of Purdue. Students Nicolas Berty, Jacob Klingaman and Hailey-Rae Rose of CU Boulder and Amy Metz and Dae Kun Kang of Oregon State are also aiding the effort.

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What the Marshall Fire can teach us about future climate catastrophes

Anonymous — Tue, 25 Jan 2022 17:17:28 +0000

What the Marshall Fire can teach us about future climate catastrophes Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 01/25/2022 - 10:17

Nearly one month after the Marshall Fire became the most destructive and one of the most unique wildfires in Colorado history, CU Boulder researchers from across campus—many of them personally affected by the fire—have pivoted and applied their expertise to the aftermath, hoping to learn from a tragedy in their own backyard and help prepare the country for the next “climate fire.”

“What makes this fire really unique is that it happened in a community that is full of researchers that study this exact topic,” said Natasha Stavros, director of the Earth Lab Analytics Hub at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) at CU Boulder. “We are going to have measurements unlike anywhere else.”

What makes this fire really unique is that it happened in a community that is full of researchers that study this exact topic. We are going to have measurements unlike anywhere else.”
–Natasha Stavros

As a grass-fueled December wildfire in a crowded suburb, the fire was quite different than the state’s massive forest fires of 2020, resulting in many novel impacts on the environment and human health. More than a dozen research projects are already underway, investigating everything from its impact on air and water quality, to the fire speeds that drove it, and how changes in infrastructure and insurance could limit damage from future fires like it. Researchers hope the findings can help inform homeowners, local governments and communities today and shape policies for tomorrow.

“In between all of us, there is so much expertise to address the causes and the impacts of this fire,” said Joost de Gouw, CIRES fellow and professor of chemistry. “If we come together to produce and publish research, we can really change the future of how we think about wildfire.”

Recipe for a winter wildfire

Three ingredients contribute to fire on the landscape: fuel, climate and ignition, said Stavros.

Due to higher-than-normal snowpack levels in late winter of 2021, a wet spring and a rainier than normal July, grasses grew abundantly in the Front Range throughout the year. By the time December rolled around, fuel accumulation was up 60% to 70% compared with a normal year. These plentiful dry grasses, combined with a 3-foot snow deficit and fierce Chinook winds, set the perfect stage that day for a spark to spiral out of control.

Avery Hatch, a CU Boulder doctoral student in environmental engineering, monitors indoor air quality in a spared home after the Marshall wildfire. (Photo by Casey A. Cass/CU Boulder)

Environmental engineering faculty Julie Korak and Cresten Mansfeldt collect water samples. (Credit: Fernando Rosario-Ortiz)

This abundant fuel would not have existed without increases in precipitation and snowmelt in the first half of 2021, followed by a drastic lack of moisture in the second half of the year—both of which point to climate as the driving cause.

“It’s the first time in my career I have felt comfortable saying this is a climate fire,” said Stavros.

Climate change will continue to have a hand in the future of wildfire, increasing the length and intensity of fire seasons as well as changing how, when and where water is distributed, said Stavros.

In addition to analyzing the impacts of fuel growth, researchers in the Earth Lab are also examining the role of another major factor in the Marshall Fiire: speed.

The Marshall Fire only burned 6,000 acres, less than half the size of Colorado’s second most destructive fire in state history, the Black Forest Fire. Yet it tore through twice as much infrastructure, accounting for 39% of all homes lost to wildfire disasters in the state since 1999, according to Maxwell Cook, doctoral student in the Department of Geography and the Earth Lab.

The fire also now ranks in the top 15 most destructive wildfire events in the western United States, only one of two grassland fires in that list.

Cook is currently working with Jennifer Balch, director of the Earth Lab, to conduct research on the factors which make a fire most likely to burn down homes.

So far, their data shows speed matters most. This may seem obvious, but Cook, Balch and their colleagues have developed new data that now allows them to track and quantify that impact.

“The speed of the fire is also really what makes it difficult for emergency management personnel to respond, to get evacuation orders out in time,” said Cook. “Management strategies that are aimed at reducing the speed of wildfires could be critically important for communities.”

This could include creating fire/fuel breaks around suburban neighborhoods and removing vegetation next to homes—strategies already broadly in use in foothills communities around Colorado. Early detection systems and quick emergency responses are also key, especially in densely populated neighborhoods.

The Earth Lab is also involved in helping develop better maps of where homes are at risk of wildfire across the West, which can help communities and insurances companies better plan for and mitigate that risk.

“We may need to think hard about what we define as the wildland urban interface (WUI). There's a lot of flammable landscape and development out there that's maybe not accounted for,” said Cook. “Building smarter, both in terms of where we build and how we build, that's going to be a big thing moving forward.”

Clearing the air

Three weeks after the fire, homeowners and renters who did not lose their residences still face an important unknown: Is it safe to go home?

Buildings were inundated with smoke, full of unhealthy compounds created as the blaze burned paint, fried refrigerators and melted metals in nearby homes. These chemicals, absorbed by surviving structures like a sponge, now pose a previously unquantified problem.

Air quality scientists from CU Boulder, CIRES and NOAA quickly compiled an online resource about the impacts of post-fire smoke cleanup in homes. Led by de Gouw, they next installed instruments in several surviving homes to measure levels of harmful gases and understand the lingering effects of smoke on indoor air quality. Another team of scientists have also been driving through affected neighborhoods with a mobile laboratory to measure what the remains of buildings emit into the immediate atmosphere.

An interdisciplinary team including engineers, social scientists and chemists from across campus will continue to collect data indoors over the coming months to inform residents and local governments and learn more about lingering human health concerns that wildfires in urban areas can present.

Downstream effects

Meanwhile, Fernando Rosario-Ortiz and his colleagues are studying water.

For years, the associate dean for faculty advancement at the College of Engineering and his colleagues in the Environmental Engineering Program have worked to understand the implications of wildfire on water. But they usually study forests.

“Combusting homes is a whole different ball game,” said Rosario-Ortiz.

It’s not just wood that’s burning in a suburban fire: It’s homes, vehicles and all the stuff in them: fabric, plastics, electronics, batteries, you name it. Those remains and the compounds created can find their way into local water systems. When a fire is quickly followed by rain or snow, as was the case with the Marshall Fire, concerns about contamination are even higher, he said.

Julie Korak and Cresten Mansfeldt, assistant professors of environmental engineering, have partnered with colleagues across campus, local community organizations and municipalities, to collect surface water samples in the area, test for concerning chemicals and address questions of watershed safety posed by residents. In the next month or so, the team will have initial results to share with stakeholders.

“Everyone here takes their water very seriously,” said Mansfeldt. “This work provides a first fingerprint of how a fire like this impacts a community, and how we can assist recovery.”

Building back better

Now that we know a fire like this is possible, the big question the Front Range faces is: How do we keep this from happening again?

A first step in answering: To get a comprehensive, birds-eye view of the damage.

Read more

Fire resources

To that end, Brad Wham, assistant research professor in the Center for Infrastructure, Energy and Space Testing, will join a national team of colleagues this week to fly drones over the burn sites before cleanup begins, gathering valuable clues about what happened that day. The work is part of a larger collaborative research effort, supported by the Resilient Infrastructure with Sustainability and Equity IRT (RISE) within the College of Engineering and Applied Science, formed in the wake of the fire to connect environmental engineers, social scientists, first responders, and policy experts conducting work on natural disasters.

And once rebuilding begins?

“It is entirely practical to build back better,” said Keith Porter, adjoint professor of civil, architecture and environmental engineering.

Porter explains that using fire resistant materials to build a home doesn’t only make it less likely to burn, but they’re a relatively cheap upgrade (less than $10,000 compared to replacing a home worth $600,000) and due to their longevity, can lead to immense savings over the life of the home.

The International Wildland Urban Interface Code, for example—adopted in parts of Boulder County—requires that fire resistant materials be used in new construction. Porter points out, however, that unless cities and counties mandate this kind of fire code, homebuilders aren’t required to swap wood shingles for a non-combustible roof or to replace vinyl siding with stucco in new developments. When rebuilding, insurance companies may mandate that a house be replaced “like for like,” potentially inhibiting homeowners from replacing flammable building materials with fire resistant ones—even if it could save insurance companies money to let people do so, according to Porter.

As affected residents navigate their insurance policies, find temporary housing in a tight market and try to stay healthy during the omicron surge, fighting for fire resistant materials may not be able to be a top priority. This is why, Porter points out, the real power to protect public safety is not on the individual, but in the hands of local officials.

“Everybody else is affected by somebody else's house burning,” said Porter. “Both in an economic sense and in a moral sense, we really are all in this together.”

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Seed grants fund research into sustainable living, disruption from construction

Anonymous — Thu, 05 Aug 2021 19:18:27 +0000

Seed grants fund research into sustainable living, disruption from construction Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 08/05/2021 - 13:18

The Resilient Infrastructure with Sustainability and Equity Interdisciplinary Research Theme is funding two new projects this summer through its seed grant initiative.
Interdisciplinary Research Themes in the college are made of faculty, staff and students. They help researchers coordinate faculty hires, share facilities and use seed funding to leverage work that could provide transformational societal impact. Seed grants in the RISE IRT are open to all affiliated faculty and come in a variety of formats.

IRT Director Shideh Dashti said she is looking forward to seeing the results coming out of these two projects in the future.

“We started this IRT to leverage, support and build on the world-class expertise in disaster resilience, sustainable design and social justice across engineering and the CU Boulder campus,” she said. “Both these projects match that goal nicely.”

Understanding construction impacts on pollution, health and social structure

Major construction projects across the U.S. are necessary for large-scale change, however they may also result in negative health impacts to local communities and create disruptions. Things like noise and air pollution and added traffic, for example, can have an outsized impact on community health and social structure.
This project, run out of the Paul M. Rady Department of Mechanical Engineering by Yu-Hong Wang, partners with three environmental justice communities in Denver to understand and help mitigate disruptions. It focuses on two major projects: a highway reconstruction project and related neighborhood redevelopment.

The goal is to create a socio-technical system that equips community members with sensors to monitor air and noise pollution and a set of smartphone apps to report their individual wellbeing and social relations.

The home as a learning-living lab

The second project is a collaboration between several groups at CU Boulder and Tuskegee University. It aims to create a participatory engineering design model that explicitly addresses historical and institutional racism.

Using land provided by Harvest Dreams, a community nonprofit organization, the two institutions will create a learning-living lab around a hybrid "Earth ship" container home concept. Proposed elements of the home include using recycled materials in construction, solar power and rainwater catchment with collected water stored in barrels and then buried for insulation.

Other design aspects include recycled materials for lighting, geothermal heating and cooling, and hydroponic methods to grow fruits and vegetables. Leadership at CU Boulder includes Scholar-in-Residence Jessica Rush Leeker, and participating groups are the College of Engineering and Applied Science, Mortenson Center in Global Engineering and the Program in Environmental Design.

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Associate Professor awarded Walter L. Huber Civil Engineering Research Prize

Anonymous — Mon, 10 May 2021 17:04:53 +0000

Associate Professor awarded Walter L. Huber Civil Engineering Research Prize Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 05/10/2021 - 11:04

Addy Stearns

Associate Professor of Geotechnical Engineering and Geomechanics Shideh Dashti has received the 2021 Walter L. Huber Civil Engineering Research Prize for “her work in advancing the state-of-the-art in evaluating and improving the seismic performance of structures on liquefiable soil deposits.”

The award consists of a certificate and $400 cash prize is scheduled to be presented to Dashti during the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) International Foundation Congress and Equipment Expo this upcoming May.

Recipients of the prize are selected based on the impact of their research, both on their chosen subdisciplines, as well as on the field of civil engineering more broadly. The factors used to measure the impact of research include:

the nominee's total number of citations
the nominee's h-index
the nominee's total research funding received to date
two or three letters of recommendation, where no more than one letter may be from a person employed at the same institution as the nominee.

The prize was endowed in 1964 by Mrs. Alberta Reed Huber in honor of her husband and past ASCE President, Walter L. Huber. The annual awards are intended to stimulate research in civil engineering.

Dashti runs the Geotechnics and Urban Resilience research group. She also serves as the director IRT-Resilient Infrastructure with Sustainability and Equity (RISE) and as the director of the Civil Engineering program.

Since joining CU Boulder in 2011, Dashti’s focus has been on projects relating to Geotechnical Earthquake Engineering, promoting multidisciplinary and global approaches to engineering using innovative knowledge dissemination tools and information technology, and training engineers that are more globally-engaged in research and practice.

Dashti received her BS in Civil Engineering from Cornell University and her MS and PhD from UC Berkeley where she began her research in GeoEngineering, using centrifuge testing and numerical analyses to study the seismic response of shallow-founded structures on liquefiable soil deposits.

Congratulations Shideh Dashti on this well-deserved honor!

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Dashti reflects on anniversary of Fukushima disaster

Anonymous — Fri, 12 Mar 2021 15:46:33 +0000

Dashti reflects on anniversary of Fukushima disaster Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 03/12/2021 - 08:46

This week marks the 10-year anniversary of the Fukushima earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster in Japan. The three explosions and release of nuclear radiation forced the evacuation of more than 150,000 people and re-opened old wounds from the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II.

Associate Professor Shideh Dashti is an expert in geotechnical engineering and geomechanics (the engineering behavior of earth materials). Her team in the Department of Civil, Environmental and Architectural Engineering researches the influence of extreme events on interacting soil-foundation-structure systems and the resilience of urban infrastructure.

Dashti is also the director of the Resilient Infrastructure with Sustainability and Equity (RISE) interdisciplinary research group in the college. That team explores holistic actions to address the many drivers of urban disaster risk worldwide, while simultaneously addressing environmental sustainability and social equity challenges.

She answered some questions on the anniversary of the disaster.

What happened at Fukushima 10 years ago? What lessons did you take away from the disaster?
When the disaster occurred, and even today, I find the story of Fukushima especially complex and multi-faceted.

It is the story of how a major power plant in a developed country – with advanced seismic codes and regulations – was still impacted by the extreme demands of a strong earthquake and tsunami. That points to the need for improved models of those hazards and engineering design procedures both for the nuclear facility itself and the sea walls protecting it.

But it is also a story of the long-term and devastating impact of failure in nuclear reactors on both human and natural environments. As well as the impact of halting nuclear power in a resource-poor, but major economy, like Japan, which, to my knowledge, has transferred some of its electricity production needs to coal and natural gas instead." All 50 nuclear reactors in Japan were shut down after Fukushima, and only nine have restarted. That has major implications for climate change prevention efforts there and globally.

There are also some really interesting interdisciplinary research questions intertwined with those topics about how a major disaster impacts trust between the public, the nuclear industry, and government with real implications on which sources of power are used and which policies are selected to maintain them.

Fukushima is, in a way, a perfect example of the need to merge knowledge and research on infrastructure resilience with considerations of energy sustainability and social justice. We recently formed (the RISE) group in our college to look at the overlap of these kinds of questions because we recognized the amount of expertise CU Boulder has in these areas and the lack of interdisciplinary work currently being done in that space. Hopefully, our research will help prevent another Fukushima one day.

Have you done any research around or into the accident in the past?
I visited Japan with a team organized by the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute (EERI) and Geotechnical Extreme Events Reconnaissance (GEER) from the U.S. to document the impacts of the earthquake and more importantly, the ensuing tsunami, on buildings and physical infrastructure such as bridges, pipelines and roads. I remember miles and miles of devastation and nothing but debris in towns affected by the tsunami. Major highways and bridges had collapsed and towns destroyed. We did not visit the nuclear reactor in Fukushima, but the intensity and impact of the tsunami on the communities, cities, and of course Fukushima, is fresh in my mind.

The case of Fukushima certainly affected my thinking deeply and contributed to the formation of ideas around infrastructure resilience with sustainability and equity.

What are new developments in infrastructure, modeling or related areas that may help prevent another Fukushima?
For miles around the plant, there are still reminders of the failure and mass evacuations. For example, radioactive soils are in temporary waste sites. Bags of radioactive waste are piled up in other places. There are still debris from the earthquake and tsunami. Evidence of radiation continue in nearby Fukushima forests. Many homes were demolished because of the radiation, now forming roads with empty lots. Collapsed structures are still visible, which need to be demolished.

One of the causes of the disaster in Fukushima was the tsunami height that exceeded the height of the existing sea walls at the time despite prior warnings. Another important and partly related cause was lack of oversight and coordination between the government and plant’s owner/regulators.

Since 2011, a new and taller sea wall has been built along the Pacific coastline to prevent future tsunamis hurtling into the plant. The government has also increased safety standards for nuclear power plants and plans to bring more reactors back online. This is now a politically challenging topic though, and the public mistrust will likely affect the decisions around how many plants to reopen, where they are located, and how they manage their waste.

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Researchers will use DOE grant to help update aging natural gas infrastructure

Anonymous — Wed, 02 Sep 2020 15:43:08 +0000

Researchers will use DOE grant to help update aging natural gas infrastructure Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 09/02/2020 - 09:43

A multi-institutional team that includes three �鶹��Ƶ civil engineering researchers has been awarded $5.4 million from the U.S. Department of Energy to help enhance the performance and longevity of natural gas distribution systems.

Led by Assistant Research Professor Brad Wham, the team will use the award from the DOE’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) to develop a new testing and modeling framework to allow the gas industry to better evaluate the products it uses to rehabilitate aging cast iron and steel natural gas pipelines.

The award is part of ARPA-E’s Rapid Encapsulation of Pipelines Avoiding Intensive Replacement (REPAIR) program. REPAIR aims to develop technologies to reduce natural gas leaks from legacy and outdated natural gas pipes by creating a suite of technologies to enable the automated construction of new pipe inside existing pipe.

“Our objective is to validate a 50-year design life for innovative pipe-in-pipe systems by developing numerical, analytical and physical testing protocols,” said Wham, who serves as managing director of the Center for Infrastructure, Energy and Space Testing (CIEST) facilities at CU Boulder.

His partners on the project will be center co-directors Mija Hubler and Shideh Dashti, as well as researchers from Cornell University, the University of Southern Queensland and the Gas Technology Institute.

Wham added that the project will focus on pinpointing when pipes are likely to fail and establishing performance criteria for replacement pipes.

“CIEST is perfectly positioned to take on this kind of critical infrastructure research,” Wham said. “We not only have the facilities and faculty expertise for large-scale structural and materials testing, but also the industry experience necessary to provide relevant, real-world recommendations that can be rapidly accepted into practice.”

Led by Assistant Research Professor Brad Wham, the team will use the award to develop a new testing and modeling framework to allow the gas industry to better evaluate the products it uses to rehabilitate aging cast iron and steel natural gas pipelines.

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