REU Site: Designing for Safety and Safety by Design

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We live in a world today where society, particularly the safety, well-being, and livelihood of its citizens, depend on the complex interactions between the natural and built environments. Safety is ensured by designing our aerospace, civil, and marine structures to withstand operational, environmental, and expected or unexpected extreme loads throughout their designed service lifetimes, and now many such structures are being pushed to serve society well past their design life. Although the structural health monitoring (SHM) field has brought new technologies, algorithms, and methods to improve damage detection, quantification, and assessment, what is missing is the ability to translate detected damage data into actionable information for stakeholders and owners to act on to ensure structural safety and performance, given relevant constraints. Information obtained through this new paradigm of Designing for Safety is crucial for informing design, repair, retrofit, and/or replacement of other existing similar structures or for future, new designs, thereby feeding back to attain the vision of Safety by Design. This research will directly address the challenge of acquiring and interpreting appropriate data streams (whether obtained through numerical modeling, experimental tests, and/or operational measurements) to synthesize information and create actionable knowledge that will enable accurate assessment and improvement of structural design, health, and performance. To achieve this goal, this REU Site at the University of California San Diego (UCSD) will recruit and train 12 diverse U.S. scholars for eight weeks each summer, recruited from across the nation with emphasis on broadening the participation of underrepresented minority, women, and economically-disadvantaged students. These students will conduct research alongside six professors and their graduate students. In addition to immersing REU students in an intensive summer research program, a plethora of career development, lab tours, graduate school application preparation, seminars, and social activities are also planned to provide each U.S. scholar with a life-changing, multidisciplinary, summer experience. The overarching goal of this NSF REU Site is to immerse students in a meaningful and highly interdisciplinary research environment within the structural engineering domain and to teach them that design does not end with construction. Instead, designing for safety embodies: quantifying potential load conditions, damage mechanics, and uncertainties; monitoring for anomalies during operations; processing this information through cyber-modeling via digital surrogates; and translating the information to actionable knowledge for improving current and future system designs. First, from concept inception to defining performance metrics to structural design, transformative research and education are needed to devise methods for aggregating and fusing computational and experimental data to inform the capabilities of different designs and the probabilities of exceeding certain safety-states. Second, once deployed, SHM/prognosis is central to achieving total structural state awareness through the integration of sensing data from multiple sources ("Internet-of-Things"), cyber modeling, and statistical pattern recognition. Finally, information acquired throughout design and operations, when combined with innovative optimization methods and a multi-scale, multi-physics, digital surrogate twin of the structure, is crucial for realizing future structural designs that outperform its predecessors. Research results generated through this project will bridge key knowledge gaps revealing the interrelations between damage formation, propagation, detection, structural modeling, model-updating, assessment, and design optimization. The planned student activities will equip young U.S. scholars with multidisciplinary technical skills and diverse perspectives so that they are uniquely poised to tackle complex, interdisciplinary, and systems-level grand challenges throughout their entire careers. The students' contributions to research and their summer experiences will raise awareness and stimulate interests in pursuing future STEM careers, which will stimulate a positive feedback loop so that novel solutions for Designing for Safety and Safety by Design will arrive sooner rather than later. UC San Diego is uniquely positioned to host this REU Site, since it is the only institution in the U.S. with programs in SHM and prognosis.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.