Design of sustainable and resilient geotechnical infrastructure for transportation systems

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Recent earthquakes have witnessed severe damage to bridges and buried structures due to ground motion, soil liquefaction and associated lateral spreading. The new 2020 National Building Code of Canada stipulates substantially increased seismic hazard across most major Canadian cities. In particular, British Columbia and the Quebec City-Montreal-Ottawa corridor are seismically active. Thus, the sustainability and resilience of the built environment have become increasingly important and of concern. Integrity of critical infrastructure relies substantially on the performance of their foundations. The proposed research program aims to develop sustainable and resilient deep foundations and buried structures for infrastructure projects, which will withstand environmental hazards and will save resources. This research will develop, test and analyze resilient and sustainable foundations and buried structures for highway and road infrastructure and will evaluate the seismic performance of different deep foundations and buried structures. The research will be accomplished using novel shake table testing and the state-of-the-art newly-established Western Geotechnical Centrifuge. In addition, full scale testing of innovative pile options and guidelines will be developed for their design. In particular, this research will investigate developing innovative grouted helical piles that can provide efficient and resilient foundation option for bridge infrastructure, and investigate an efficient precast three-sided reinforced concrete (TSRC) culverts for road and highway infrastructure and develop specific guidelines for their design. This is particularly important as the current practice used for design as specified in Canadian Highway Bridge Design Code (CHBDC) treats TSRC culverts same as the conventional box culverts, which results in overly conservative and expensive design. The developed design guidelines will be submitted to the relevant CHBDC committee for consideration of incorporating them in the next version of the code. The research will also investigate the seismic performance of helical piles and pressure grouted helical piles. The findings from this study will allow bridge engineers to use these foundation options to support bridges and other transportation infrastructure in seismic active regions across Canada. In addition, the seismic response of pile-supported bridges will be analyzed using machine learning-based approach. This will lead to quantifying the in-earthquake damage and post-earthquake carrying capacity of damaged bridges for operations. These results can assist transport agencies to assign damage tags immediately after the earthquake for public cognition (e.g., green, yellow and red tags for full operation, limited operation, and close, respectively). It is anticipated that this research program will benefit many new infrastructure projects and assessing the seismic vulnerability of existing ones.