RAPID/Collaborative Research: Japan-U.S. Collaboration on the Seismic Performance of Reinforced Concrete Structures

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Reinforced concrete (RC) structures comprise most of the multi-family residential buildings in the U.S. and many other countries. When buildings are subjected to catastrophic events such as earthquakes, there is the need to assess their level of structural safety after the event. Structural assessment activities present two challenges - collecting high quality damage data and interpreting the acquired data in a meaningful and rational way - to produce estimates of the level of safety and residual strength of the inspected building. While advanced data acquisition systems are available to collect structural damage data, new methods are needed to analyze the collected data to assess structural performance. This Grant for Rapid Response Research (RAPID) will support a team of researchers from the University of Washington and the University of Nevada, Reno, to collaborate with researchers from Japanese universities on experimental research investigating the seismic performance of RC building systems. The experimental research will involve the dynamic testing of a full-scale, three-story RC building as part of the ongoing Tokyo Metropolitan Resilience Project (TMRP) supported in Japan by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology and the National Research Institute for Earth Science and Disaster Resilience. The experiments will be conducted at the world's largest shake table, E-Defense in Miki, Japan, in December 2019. The main goal of this RAPID project is to acquire, process, and analyze dynamic response and damage data pertaining to both structural and non-structural elements of the building. The data will be collected using equipment recently acquired by the NSF-supported Natural Hazards Engineering Research Infrastructure (NHERI) RAPID Facility (https://rapid.designsafe-ci.org/) and the high-speed, high-resolution digital image correlation (DIC) integrated monitoring system recently developed at the University of Nevada, Reno. The processing and interpretation of this data will advance the state of knowledge and practice in post-earthquake structural assessments of buildings. The project will train two graduate students and several undergraduate students in structural integrity research and promote collaboration between Japanese and U.S. researchers. All collected data will be archived and made publicly available in the NSF-supported NHERI Data Depot (https://www.DesignSafe-ci.org/). Additionally, the results of this project will be disseminated via journal publications, conference presentations, a public webinar, and live broadcasts. This project contributes to NSF's role in the National Earthquake Hazards Reduction Program (NEHRP). In this RAPID project, the Japanese and U.S. research team will investigate the seismic performance of a full-scale, three-story RC building system tested at the E-Defense shake table as part of the Japanese TMRP project. The key objectives of this collaborative project are to: (1) provide better understanding of dynamic response of RC buildings, (2) investigate the capabilities of new instrumentation to capture structural performance and damage data, and (3) evaluate current post-earthquake structural assessment procedures and use the acquired data to provide information for refinements. The collected data and structural assessment procedures will also help policymakers in the U.S., Japan, and other countries to plan retrofit efforts strategically and effectively.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.