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Project Summary
Broader Impacts: This project pioneers an integrated education, outreach, dissemination and implementation program including involvement in project research tasks of 15 undergraduate students from underrepresented groups and programs (AGEP) and faculty from a minority institution; plans for recruiting several of these students to the graduate program; an innovative science museum interface with K-12 students and the general public; summer engineering camps for minority and female students; plans for providing hands on experience to 20 students of a community college; outreach programs to engineers, architects and industry practitioners; and, plans for revisions to building codes, standards, and performance-based earthquake engineering guidelines.
The project will support the research studies of 15 graduate students and the involvement in project research tasks and activities of 21 undergraduate students. In addition to facilitating the project’s unique research opportunities, NEESit will be used for on-line participation by students around the country and will ignite interest in engineering in general and earthquake engineering in particular resulting in significant broader impacts on the engineering workforce.
Intellectual Merit: The proposed systems engineering research will move the field to a new level of experimentally validated computer simulation of nonstructural systems and establish a model methodology for future systems engineering studies. A system-level multi-site experimental research plan will result in a large-scale tunable test-bed with adjustable dynamic properties, which will be useful for future experiments. Subsystem and systemlevel experimental results will produce unique fragility data useful for practitioners.
Experimental evaluation of new protective devices and designs will result in an assessment of their capability for enhancing the seismic performance of ceiling-piping-partition nonstructural systems. An integrated multidisciplinary simulation and visualization program will explore new techniques to produce:
(i) new simulation and visualization tools that will provide innovative 3D modeling mechanisms and reliable models to be used by researchers and practitioners;
(ii) state-ofthe-art robust fragility data; and,
(iii) tools that can be used for education and implementation purposes.
Finally, important public policy implications will be investigated through the use of representative index buildings and urban planning tools to estimate the cost benefits of the new protective devices and design concepts at both the individual building and the metropolitan area scales. The results will address important implementation barriers and provide compelling public policy rationales for amendments to building codes and standards and related guidelines.
