CAREER: Beyond the Code - Towards Next Generation Design for Deep Foundations

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This Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) award will create a synthesized, geo-structural, and risk-informed framework for deep foundation engineering analysis and design. Recent events, both domestically and internationally, have highlighted the critical nature of foundation resilience in ensuring continued infrastructure function following natural disasters. The framework to be developed will be capable of providing next-generation resistance formulations for infrastructure foundations capable of reliably and holistically assessing the behavior and response of deep foundations under multiaxial loading. The framework will offer more accurate and parsimonious design solutions which will reduce overdesign, and require less material. It will spur the introduction and implementation of novel instrumentation technologies and sustainable materials. In addition, research findings will accelerate the transition to use of high-performance materials with permanently integrated integrity assessment capabilities by providing a validated design platform to accurately characterize foundation response behavior. This will potentially result in substantial reductions in the cost of building foundations. The CAREER educational objectives focus on stimulating interdisciplinary curiosity and growth through diverse curricular efforts and industry involvement in geo-structural undergraduate and graduate classroom training. It will cater to the increasing demand for technical rigor and a global mindset in engineering graduates. Professional career development activities will supplement the technical educational activities to increase the retention of diversity in geo-structural engineering in academia and industry, and stimulate a lifelong interest in research and development. The latter part of the educational plan will specifically target female engineers, and is aligned with NSF INCLUDES.The core of the CAREER research consists of executing well-coordinated, large-scale experimental- and risk-informed numerical simulations to generate baseline knowledge that aids the development of integrated, performance-based assessment metrics. Specifically, this research will enable the (i) derivation of robust, next-generation loading-response formulations; (ii) development of creative experimental tools to holistically evaluate damage evolution; (iii) validation of models for design and post-hazard integrity analyses, and (iv) risk-driven sensitivity studies to connect all components into a unified decision-making framework. In addition, the experimental studies will fill vital data gaps through prototype-scale testing of soil-pile systems for which limited research has been performed, i.e., specifically targeting piles with complex structural fixity conditions at the pile head and pile tip. Another aspect of the research will develop innovative experimental tools to improve our fundamental understanding of complex three-dimensional (3D) soil-structure interaction (SSI) by extracting volumetric measurements in deep foundation systems via 3D printed, cast in place instrumentation technologies. The research program will benefit the profession by implementing new understanding in software tools usable for individual component and system analysis for a broad spectrum of infrastructure beyond deep foundations.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.