MRI: Acquisition of State-of-the-Art Soil-Structure Interaction Facility

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Soil-structure interaction (SSI) is one of the major challenges that faces the civil engineering community; partly because SSI requires multidisciplinary research efforts and partly because of the lack of advanced sensors specifically designed for research purposes. SSI significantly affects the nation?s infrastructure including bridges, underground structures, retaining systems, tunnels, and offshore platforms. This award is to acquire equipment to establish a state-of-the-art soil-structure interaction facility at Lafayette College. The key to better understanding SSI is accurately measuring the contact pressure and movement at the interface between a structure and the surrounding soil. The instrumentation to be purchased through this award, especially the advanced pressure and deformation sensors, offer the advantages of minimum intrusion resulting in accurate pressure and deformation measurements. These measurements significantly enhance our understanding of the behavior of structures that depend on SSI. In addition to the advanced sensors, the award will fund two flexibly designed soil boxes, a data acquisition system, load and pressure sensors, soil compactors, soil quality control and characterization equipment, and analysis tools. The broader impacts of this award include developing new upper level undergraduate elective courses that focus on design, analysis, instrumentation, and measurements of SSI systems. The facility, with video conferencing and web broadcasting capabilities, allow faculty at other institutions to use the facility in their research and teaching.