REU Site: Designing for Safety and Safety by Design

我们生活在一个社会，特别是公民的安全、福祉和生计，依赖于自然环境和建筑环境之间复杂的相互作用的世界。通过设计我们的航空航天、民用和海洋结构，以确保其在设计使用寿命内承受操作、环境和预期或意外的极端载荷，现在许多这样的结构正在被推向服务社会，远远超过其设计寿命。尽管结构健康监测（SHM）领域带来了新的技术、算法和方法来改进损伤检测、量化和评估，但在相关限制条件下，缺乏将检测到的损伤数据转化为可操作信息的能力，以供利益相关者和业主采取行动，确保结构安全和性能。通过这种新的安全设计范式获得的信息对于设计、维修、改造和/或替换其他现有的类似结构或未来的新设计至关重要，从而反馈以实现设计安全的愿景。这项研究将直接解决获取和解释适当数据流（无论是通过数值模拟、实验测试还是操作测量获得）的挑战，以综合信息并创建可操作的知识，从而能够准确评估和改进结构设计、健康和性能。为了实现这一目标，加州大学圣地亚哥分校（UCSD）的REU网站将在每年夏季招募和培训12名来自全国各地的不同类型的美国学者，为期8周，重点是扩大代表性不足的少数民族、女性和经济弱势学生的参与。这些学生将与六名教授及其研究生一起进行研究。除了让REU学生沉浸在密集的夏季研究项目中，还计划为每位美国学者提供大量的职业发展，实验室参观，研究生院申请准备，研讨会和社会活动，以改变生活，多学科的夏季体验。这个NSF REU网站的首要目标是让学生沉浸在结构工程领域有意义的、高度跨学科的研究环境中，并教导他们设计并不以施工结束。相反，安全设计体现在：量化潜在的载荷条件、损伤机制和不确定性；监测操作过程中的异常情况；通过数字代理通过网络建模处理这些信息；并将信息转化为可操作的知识，以改进当前和未来的系统设计。首先，从概念开始到定义性能指标，再到结构设计，需要进行变革性的研究和教育，以设计出聚合和融合计算和实验数据的方法，以告知不同设计的能力和超过某些安全状态的概率。其次，一旦部署，通过整合来自多个来源（“物联网”）的传感数据、网络建模和统计模式识别，SHM/预测对于实现总体结构状态感知至关重要。最后，在整个设计和操作过程中获取的信息，结合创新的优化方法和多尺度、多物理场、结构的数字替代孪生体，对于实现超越其前辈的未来结构设计至关重要。通过该项目产生的研究成果将弥合揭示损伤形成、传播、检测、结构建模、模型更新、评估和设计优化之间相互关系的关键知识差距。计划中的学生活动将为年轻的美国学者提供多学科的技术技能和多样化的视角，使他们在整个职业生涯中都能独特地应对复杂的、跨学科的、系统级的重大挑战。学生们对研究的贡献和他们的暑期经历将提高人们对未来STEM职业的认识和兴趣，这将刺激一个积极的反馈循环，从而为安全设计和设计安全提供新的解决方案，而不是迟来。加州大学圣地亚哥分校是美国唯一一所拥有SHM和预后项目的机构，因此拥有这个REU网站。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.