NEESR-SG: Soil Improvement Strategies to Mitigate Impact of Seismic Ground Failures via Novel Integration of Experiment and Simulation

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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).This novel integration will result in robust mitigation strategies for seismically-induced ground failure that can be implemented in a performance-based earthquake engineering environment. Besides reducing societal impacts from ground failures by reducing ground improvement costs, environmental impacts, and construction time, other broader impacts include: (1) opening new avenues for future performance-based earthquake engineering studies involving foundation performance and ground improvement; and (2) initiating an educational exchange between Valparaiso University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to expand student exposure to research and better prepare them for practice. Data from this project will be made available through the NEES data repository (http://www.nees.org).