CAREER: Toward a New Paradigm in Evaluating and Mitigating Urban Liquefaction

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This Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) grant will create a new approach for evaluating the behavior of clusters of buildings on liquefiable ground during earthquakes, and pave the way toward designing mitigation measures that improve building performance at a system level. Earthquake-induced soil liquefaction can cause substantial damage to urban areas where multiple buildings and infrastructure systems are clustered. Previous studies have shown that buildings located in close proximity to one another can interact during earthquakes affecting ground motions, settlement patterns, and building damage potential. The parameters that control the seismic performance of building clusters are poorly understood. As a result, mitigation measures that are currently designed perform poorly, particularly when the performance of a building is evaluated in the context of its surroundings. This award supports a systematic study of the impact of adjacent buildings on the effectiveness of liquefaction remediation techniques. In doing so, this award contributes to the resilience of cities globally. In its outreach plan, this effort will improve production and dissemination of knowledge on infrastructure performance during urban disasters through a pilot, community reconnaissance platform. In its educational plan, the grant aims to improve retention among engineering students through pedagogical innovations and an international post-disaster reconnaissance program for undergraduate students.This CAREER grant will advance the science and practice of disaster mitigation in urban areas by enhancing the fundamental understanding of how building clusters respond during earthquakes. The primary objectives of this research are to: 1) study the impact of multiple structure-soil-structure-interaction (SSSI) on the seismic performance of buildings on liquefiable soils and on the effectiveness of mitigation techniques; and 2) identify the fundamental predictors of building performance individually and as a cluster. This will be done through a combination of centrifuge experiments and numerical simulations. This study sets the groundwork for the future development of a probabilistic liquefaction mitigation methodology that relies on mechanistically validated models. The development of validated numerical models and knowledge of the key predictors of the performance of building clusters will enable an effective mitigation of the liquefaction hazard at a scale beyond one isolated building. This effort will enable designing future mitigation measures that dissipate seismic energy and deformation simultaneously to improve performance at a system level.