NEES Research Program Funds Grand Challenge on
Ceiling-Piping-Partition Systems
 The George E. Brown, Jr., Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES) research program of the National Science Foundation has awarded to the University of Nevada, Reno (UNR) a $3.6 million Grand Challenge grant to study the seismic performance of ceiling-piping-partition nonstructural systems. Nonstructural systems represent 75% of the value of buildings in the US exposed to earthquakes and have been estimated by FEMA to account for even slightly more than that in estimated future earthquake losses of the nation.
This Grand Challenge project will integrate multidisciplinary system-level studies that will develop, for the first time, a simulation capability and implementation process for enhancing the seismic performance of the ceiling-piping-partition system. A comprehensive experimental program is proposed that will use the University of Nevada, Reno (UNR) and the University at Buffalo, SUNY (UB) NEES Equipment Sites to conduct subsystem and system-level full-scale experiments.
[view entire announcement]
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News & Events
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Nonstructural Project Team Meeting held on April 23, 2010 at the University at Buffalo, SUNY - including live demonstration of pipe testing in SEESL lab.
[read more] |
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Test video from the NEES@Buffalo site showing good behavior of a slip track - This time lapse video shows slippage of the top track of a wall specimen.
[download video] ~ 8 MB |
Preliminary Project Results of Subsystem and Component Experiments
NCS Subsystem Experiments on Partition Walls [more] |
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