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Sponsors

Funded by the
National Science Foundation
under Grant no.: CMMI-0721399

Additional support provided by
the following: Industry Contributors

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]

News & Events

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]

Visit of North Carolina A&T State University Students to the University at Buffalo NEES Site
- February 16, 2009 [read more]

The vision of this Grand Challenge research project is to significantly enhance the seismic resilience of buildings and communities, by providing practicing engineers and architects with verified tools and guidelines for the understanding, prediction and improvement of the seismic response of the ceiling-piping-partition nonstructural system. [more]