adapted from the 2013 curee calendar illustrated essays … · adapted from the 2013 curee calendar...

Celebrating 25 Yearsadapted from the 2013 CUREE Calendarillustrated essays by Robert Reitherman

© 2013 - All Rights Reserved.

Consortium of Universities for Research in Earthquake Engineering1301 South 46th Street, Richmond, CA 94804-4600 tel: 510-665-3529 fax: 510-665-3622

http://www.curee.orgCUREE

Cover photo: All cover photos CUREE, except for “Guidelines for Earthquake Damage and Assessment” (Exponent); and “NEES Nonstructural Project” (Shojiro Motoyui, Tokyo Institute of Technology).

CUREE Organizational Description

The Consortium of Universities for Research in Earthquake Engineering (CUREE), is a non-profit organization incorporated in 1988 whose purpose is the advancement of earthquake engineering research, education, and implementation. As of Fall, 2011, there are 22 member universities in the organization, and approximately 250 individual professors belong to CUREE.

Universities + Research + Earthquakes + EngineeringCUREE is focused on four things, as its name clearly indicates: universities, research, earthquakes, and engineering. In recent years, it has also branched out beyond the earthquake topic to touch on other civil engineering themes, and it has mounted several exhibitions to extend education to the realm of engaging the general public in exploring engineering concepts.

Wilfred IwanCaltech

1988 - 1991

Haresh ShahStanford University

1992 - 1993

Stephen MahinUC Berkeley1994 - 1996

Helmut KrawinklerStanford University

1997 - 1998

James BeckCaltech

1998 - 1999

Karl RomstadUC Davis

1999

Gerard PardoenUC Irvine

1999 - 2001

André Filiatrault UC San Diego*

2001 - 2002

Roberto LeonGeorgia Tech**

2003 - 2004

Andrew WhittakerUniversity at Buffalo, SUNY

2005 - 2011

CUREE Past-Presidents

* affiliation at time of presidency, now at University at Buffalo, SUNY

** affiliation at time of presidency, now at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

2013 marks the 25th anniversary of CUREE. With this milestone, we reflect not only on CUREE’s past contributions to advancing the earth-quake engineering profession, but also on what our contributions will be in the future.

CUREE has 22 University Members, each with a designated CUREE member on the faculty who serves as that University’s Representative. To build a future vision, we organized a meeting of the Member University Representatives in August, 2012, in San Francisco to discuss how to best leverage our organization’s resources through new projects and directions that CUREE can pursue. One of the outcomes of this meeting was a list of research topics that have the potential to leave an important and lasting impact in the earthquake engineering field and that can involve CUREE. Based on these topics, a competitive call for proposals for seed-funding to be provided by CUREE was put out to the CUREE membership in October. That membership comprises about 250 professors who have been admitted by the Board of Directors one-by-one based on their qualifications in the field. We had an excellent response to the RFP, and in 2013 CUREE will be funding several promising initiatives. We hope to continue providing our members and practicing engineers with excellent services by having these seed-funds bear fruit.

At times we can find ourselves overwhelmed with so many activities and so many professional societies that we forget what each organization is about. As a reminder, according to the CUREE website (www.curee.org), CUREE represents “the interests and capabilities of engineering faculty members and programs in developing research projects that mobilize these capabilities in the effort to solve significant earthquake problems.” Education within academia and also education of the public about civil engineering are also within the organization’s scope. Past projects have also typically involved practicing engineers in the field. We have benefited greatly over the years from the contributions made by the Directors on our Board who represent professional practice. We have also been gratified to see how much of benefit to both practice and academia has come from the past several years of CUREE’s collaboration with the Applied Technology Council conducting

President’s Messageprojects for the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the lead agency for the National Earthquake Hazards Reduction Program.

I would like to emphasize that CUREE represents our members and we are here to assist you with developing research that benefits society by utilizing your expertise and providing opportunities for your students. Further, we are currently a free service to our membership. What other professional organization can say all of this? We encourage you therefore to take advantage and become involved. For example, you can work with CUREE to develop a research team and to head up large (or even small) projects. While CUREE’s expertise is centered in the earthquake engineering sub-discipline, other aspects of civil engineering are also of interest to our members. I look forward to seeing CUREE develop new initiatives in the future with the talented members that it represents.

In the past, we have been successful in working together to advance the field thanks to the hard work of our staff, Executive Director Bob Reitherman, Associate Executive Director Reed Helgens, and Media Manager Darryl Wong, and to our past presidents, the professors pictured on the previous page who deserve credit for taking the time from their busy careers to lead the organization. Over a hundred different individuals have served as members of the Board of Directors, serving without pay to provide their guidance for our non-profit corporation. Several hundred professors and their students have been funded on CUREE projects, providing the expertise that has made our initiatives successful. Some of the fruits of the efforts of all these individuals are highlighted in the following pages of the calendar, accomplishments for which they can justly be proud.

Maria Moreyra GarlockPresident, Consortium of Universities for Research in Earthquake EngineeringAssociate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Princeton University

March 1, 1988 marks the date of incorporation of the Consortium of Universities for Research in Earthquake Engineering (CUREE) as a

non-profit public benefit organization, although the name at that point was California Universities for Research in Earthquake Engineering. The name change relates to one of the steps in the evolution of the organization that occurred a dozen years later, one of a few significant phases covered here.

But first, a necessary preamble back to the years prior to 1988.

In the 1960s, the National Science Foundation (NSF) annually funded earthquake engineering research via grants to universities at about the $1 million level, for example $1,045,600 in 1967 (Gaus 1969, p. 11), or $7.2 million in 2012 dollars. The current figure is approximately $50 million, of which $12 million is earmarked for research that must use the Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES), and a little less than twice that, $20 to $23 million in recent years, for the maintenance and operation of the NEES laboratories at 14 universities and an extensive information technology system (National Science Foundation 2011, Facilities appendix, pp. 47-48).

The destruction of the 1964 Alaska and especially the 1971 San Fernanado Earthquakes provided the momentum that helped to pass the National Earthquake Hazards Reduction Act in October 1977 and the resulting National Earthquake Hazards Reduction Program (NEHRP). NSF began to annually receive, in round numbers, $20 million a year for its earthquake engineering and social science disaster grants. Borrowing a term from the geologists, who use saltation to refer to the way particles such as sand rolling along in the wind can be suddenly bumped into the air and leap forward, this was a major saltation in the funding for earthquake engineering research in the United States.

A Short History of CUREEby Robert Reitherman, Executive Director

In 1996, after a national contest, NSF awarded $5 million annually for a decade for a national center for earthquake engineering research, that being its exact title, headquartered at the University at Buffalo in the State University of New York system. The State of New York provided matching funds. The collaborating universities in NCEER were centered in the Northeast. In the twenty years after NEHRP was established, a number of universities around the nation had developed earthquake engineering programs, whereas in the 1960s, one could point to a much smaller list, mainly California universities and programs at the University of Illinois, University of Michigan, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) (Reitherman 2012, p. 418).

With the passage of time, those who were in the field at the time may have forgotten how acrimoniously the NSF decision was received in California, whose entry in the contest, proposing a headquarters at the University of California at Berkeley with other California universities as collaborating institutions, was thought by many to be the front runner in the contest. It is enough of a data point measuring the controversy at the time in this brief historical review to mention that both California Senators officially protested the decision and a Government Accounting Office (GAO) report had to be done to evaluate whether the decision was appropriate (Government Accounting Office 1987). The GAO found “no evidence that the panel showed favoritism for one proposal over the other” but concluded NSF staff should have provided more precise criteria regarding receipt of matching funds and done a better job of presenting information to the panel.

With NCEER a fact of life to which the California universities had to adjust, their efforts turned to forming some type of multi-university organization that could compete for funds and maintain prominence in the field. At that time, the Earthquake Engineering Research Center (EERC) at the University of California at Berkeley had been growing

Collapsed highways during the 1971 San Fernando Earthquakesource: R. Kachadoorian (121c),

US Geological Survey

U.C. Berkeley shake table

since its establishment in January of 1968, with its shake table in operation by 1972, but there was nothing like NCEER that was set up specifically to involve multiple universities.

Thus in 1987, several key individuals among the California universities, including Bruce Bolt, Wilfred (Bill) Iwan, and others, took the initiative to set up California Universities for Research in Earthquake Engineering, incorporated as a non-profit public benefit organization on March 1, 1988, and subsequently Internal Revenue Service 401 (c) status was obtained. At that time, the acronym was spelled CUREe. The eight founding university members were California Institute of Technology, Stanford University, the University of Southern California, and the University of California campuses at Berkeley, Davis, Irvine, Los Angeles, and San Diego.

With the organization in place, the next step was to obtain funding. It came from afar, from Japan, from the Kajima Corporation. Through the discussions of some key CUREe professors, including Joseph Penzien, Alfredo H-S. Ang, and Bill Iwan (Penzien 2004, p. 76), a multi-year CUREe-Kajima Joint Research Program was established. The key person at Kajima was Takuji Kobori. Kobori had been a professor at Kyoto University and recognized the value of academic research to the development of Kajima’s capabilities. In one two-year or three-year phase after another, the joint program lasted twenty years, until 2010. The range of topics was very broad, from ground motion studies to particular structural investigations to seismic risk analyses.

Another collaboration with Japan came with the 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake. CUREe obtained funding from the Building Contractors Society of Japan to systematically compile geologic and strong motion data.

Following the Northridge Earthquake, CUREe obtained funding from all four NEHRP agencies – NSF, U.S.Geological Survey, National Institute of Standards and Technology, and Federal Emergency Management Agency – to bring together researchers and potential users of the research soon after NEHRP research grants had been issued to study the earthquake. Then, when enough time had passed for research to be conducted, the second phase collected papers together in a multi-volume set that remains the most comprehensive single source of information on that earthquake (CUREe 1998). This multi-year effort was truly national in scope, and no distinction was made on the basis of the region of origin of the research. CUREe still had its original California set of members, but had begun to become more national in its outlook.

Prior to the 1994 Northridge Earthquake, CUREe decided it needed a small staff to run the organization, and after a national search, the author was selected as executive director. An office was established at the University of California Richmond Field Station in the second floor of the shake table building through the auspices of Professor Stephen Mahin, who was then president of CUREe. The office has remained there to date. Budgeting, payment approval, NSF grant reporting, audits, and other financial affairs were put on a systematic basis, and proposal initiatives were developed. Soon, a large grant ($5.2 million) from FEMA was obtained for an applied research project concerning woodframe buildings, whose performance in the Northridge Earthquake was not as reliable as many engineers had assumed. About the same time, CUREe joined forces with the Structural Engineers Association of California and the Applied Technology Council to form the SAC Joint Venture and devote academic and practicing engineer capabilities toward the problem of solving the welded moment-resisting frame problems that surfaced in that earthquake. In both cases, CUREe developed the ability to manage over 60 subcontracts and deal uniformly with universities inside

Professor Bruce Boltsource: UC Berkeley

Dr. Takuji Kobori

and outside the state, another indication the organization was moving toward its eventual national, rather than California, composition.

Meanwhile, the ten-year term of NSF funding to NCEER that began in 1986 was nearing an end, and NSF decided to hold another contest, but this time it left open the possibility of awarding more than one center. The CUREe member universities decided that a unified proposal should be developed in response, and that process started in January of 1986 when Caltech professor Paul Jennings was appointed head of a committee that had one representative from each of CUREe’s eight member universities. To obtain the required matching funds from the state, a California Seismic Safety Commission bill had already been drafted, and CUREe was inserted in the bill’s language to be the entity receiving the funding. After several rounds of meetings of the Jennings committee, a consensus was reached that U.C. Berkeley should be the lead university, and CUREe then had the bill rewritten to make that change. By the end of the summer, the bill had passed, and the proposal that was later to be approved by NSF was funded, creating the Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research Center, PEER. NCEER morphed into MCEER, the Multidisciplinary Center for Earthquake Engineering Research, still headquartered at Buffalo. A new center, MidAmerica Earthquake Center (MAE) headquartered at the University of Illinois, was the third center funded by NSF.

CUREe once again had adjusted to the direction taken by NSF, and it was to adjust again shortly after NSF decided to devote a large portion of its earthquake engineering budget to what became the Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation. Such a network was to be truly national, whereas the three centers were regionally focused. CUREe’s experience with the Woodframe and SAC Steel projects gave it confidence that the landscape of academia in the earthquake engineering field had grown to be truly national in capabilities, and it decided to open its membership to universities outside the state. In 2000, the name changed to Consortium of

Universities for Research in Earthquake Engineering and the acronym to CUREE. Almost immediately, the membership quadrupled. In the dozen years since its founding, the California-centric membership and outlook of CUREE had changed markedly.

In the competition to establish NEES, NSF called for a consortium to set up its administrative hub, in parallel with the competition to decide which universities would receive large equipment grants for new or enhanced laboratories. CUREE won that competition and by 2004 had put in place a new NEES Consortium non-profit organization (Reitherman 2004). In that instance, it proved the worth of having a truly national association of universities to bring them together to work toward a common goal.

More projects of the organization are illustrated in the following pages that show the variety and range of CUREE’s capabilities that have developed over the years.

References CitedCalifornia Universities for Research in Earthquake Engineering (1998). Proceedings of the NEHRP conference and workshop on research on the Northridge, California Earthquake of January 17, 1994. California Universities for Research in Earthquake Engineering, Richmond, CA, four volumes.

Gaus, Michael (1969). “Earthquake engineering support by the National Science Foundation,” Report on the NSF-UCEER conference on earthquake engineering research, Universities Council for Earthquake Engineering Research, Pasadena, CA.

Government Accounting Office (1987). Problems found in decision process for awarding earthquake center, Washington, DC.

National Science Foundation (2011). National Science Foundation FY 2012 budget request to congress, National Science Foundation, Arlington, VA.

Penzien, Joseph (2004). Connections: EERI Oral History Series, Joseph Penzien, Stanley Scott and Robert Reitherman, interviewers, Earthquake Engineering Research Institute, Oakland, CA.

Reitherman, Robert (2004). “A short history of NEES,” http://www.curee.org/projects/NEES/history.html.

Reitherman, Robert (2012). Earthquakes and engineers: An international history. ASCE Press, Reston, VA.

CUREECONSORTIUM of UNIVERSITIES for RESEARCH in EARTHQUAKE ENGINEERING

2013

The CUREE-Kajima Joint Research ProgramKajima Corporation traces its origins back to 1840, after which it quickly grew to become an industry leader in the field of architectural-engineering-construction. Headquartered in Tokyo, Japan, it is a global operation. Through the efforts of CUREE members such as Wilfred Iwan of Caltech, the partnership of CUREE-Kajima was created, and for 20 years, CUREE was funded by Kajima to engage professors and graduate students, and manage research, in a variety of research areas. Many CUREE members were project subcontractors and/or members of the Oversight Committee, working with the highly respected Takuji Kobori, head of the Kobori Research Complex, Inc., until his passing in 2007.

CUREe

Collapse of the Hanshin Expressway of Kobe in the January 17, 1995 Great Hanshin (or Hyogo-Ken-Nanbu) Earthquake.

- source: Charles A. Kircher

The original logo for this project, based on the Japanese Kanji symbol for a person, helped to graphically show the relationship with Japan and CUREE (then a California organization).

Professor Wilfred (Bill) Iwan presents Dr. Masamitsu Miyamura with a special plaque commemorating twenty years of collaborative research between CUREE and the Kajima Corporation.


2013

The SAC Steel ProjectWith funding from FEMA and the California Office of Emergency Services, research was conducted to develop solutions for the identification, evaluation, repair, and modification of damaged welded steel moment frame buildings. Effort was also devoted to new design and construction approaches. Numerous technical reports and guidelines were produced. The project concluded in 2000, with the reports and technical studies from the project being archived at the website:

www.sacsteel.org

CUREe

Test specimen from the SAC Steel Project

From the outset, it was recognized that an interdisciplanary approach to the solution was required, involving practicing structural engineers, engineering researchers, building officials and other representatives of regulator agencies or standards-setting organizations.

One of the ductile connections developed from research conducted after the Northridge Earthquake.

- C-.M. Uang (UC San Diego)


2013

Honoring Those Who Helped To Shape Earthquake EngineeringCUREE is very fortunate to name among its membership, past and present, some of the most respected and internationally famous engineers in the field of earthquake engineering. We are honored to have hosted symposiums recognizing a few of these members, and have had occasion to design and present plaques and awards recognizing the achievements by individuals and organizations who have worked with CUREE in advancing the field of civil engineering. The first symposium held by CUREE was in honor of George Housner, widely regarded as the founding father of modern earthquake engineering.

The Northridge Earthquake Research Conference -George Housner speaks at the CUREe hosted conference held in 1998 at Caltech on the topic of the January 17, 1994 Northridge Earthquake.

The first Ph.D in the United States for work specifically in earthquake engineering was earned by George Housner (1910-2008) in 1941.

Housner

EERC-CUREE Symposium in Honor of Vitelmo BerteroUniversity of California, BerkeleyJanuary 31- February 1, 1997 - Berkeley, Calfornia

Some of the attendees of the first CUREE symposium honoring George Housner.

CloughPenzienKobori IwanBertero


2013

The CUREE-Caltech Woodframe ProjectAfter the 1994 Northridge Earthquake, CUREE and Caltech teamed together and were awarded funds through FEMA for the The Earthquake Hazard Mitigation of Woodframe Construction project, or the CUREE-Caltech Woodframe Project for short. Its goal was to coordinate engineering investigations and implementation activities whose objective was to significantly reduce earthquake losses to woodframe construction. To tackle this large and multi-faceted project, it was divided into five interrelated elements, which were managed by CUREE over a five year period. Numerous publications were generated and are available through the CUREE publications website.

CUREE-CaltECh WoodfRamE PRojECt IndEx BUIldIngs

[Clockwise from top] Damage to apartment buildings with tuck-under parking during 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake; illustration of torsion; shake table seismic experimentation of a 3-story apartment building with tuck-under parking tested at U.C.Berkeley; a new steel frame, designed to resist seismic forces was installed and tested to simulate how the original building could be retrofitted.

An index building is a hypothetical but realistic archetypical design, developed almost to the point of actual working drawings ("blueprints") that could be used to construct it.

For four basic index buildings, three different levels of quality construction were defined. They were subjected to structural and cost analyses.


2013

Marta Macias Brown at the First NEES Consortium Annual Meering in Park City, Utah.

Ian Buckle, then NEES president, addresses attendees of the NEES 1st Annual Meeting.

George E. Brown, Jr.

Demonstration of the NEES@OSU Tsunami Wave Basin

Remote participation by users with the NEES@Rensselaer Centrifuge.

Demonstration of the NEES@UTexas remote simulator (a.k.a. T-Rex)

Professor Bruce Kutter supervising the control room for the NEES@UCDavis centrifuge.

The original Board of Directors for the NEES Consortium.

Equipment Sites

System Integration

Remote Participation

CollaborationNEES Consortium Development Project

In 2001, NSF issued a solicitation to develop a new organization to manage the NEES Collaboratory, at the same time that fifteen earthquake engineering testing facilities were being developed with NEES funding. After a competitive process, NSF selected CUREE to start the NEES Consortium. The George E. Brown Jr. Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES) Consortium Development Project involved hundreds of academic and practicing engineers participating in workshops and organizational development meetings over a three-year period, including the development of the master budget and proposal for the decade-long operation of NEES.


2013

Developing Outreach Opportunities for Earthquake EngineeringTo facilitate communications between civil engineers and informal educators (e.g. science museums), NSF funded CUREE to produce a monograph "Building Bridges Between Civil Engineers and Science Museums," which presented common concerns and areas of mutual benefit for the engineer and museum exhibit designer. CUREE has also created outdoor exhibits, traveling exhibits, and customized demonstrations.

At the 2009 NSF CMMI Engineering Research and Innovation conference, CUREE was one of the exhibitors providing demonstrations on seismic response in structures to the local school children, ages kindergarten to high school. Exhibits were developed and constructed by CUREE.

Exhibits demonstrating the effect of the frequency of the shaking and of the

structures.

CUREE has toured this E-Defense motorized shake table model to several venues.

The free month-long public exhibit on earthquake engineering, funded by the City of San Francisco, drew early morning crowds on the 100th anniversary of the 1906 earthquake. The time the

of the historic earthquake was 5:12 AM.


2013

Exhibit DevelopmentCUREE has designed and/or constructed a wide variety of exhibits for use in public displays or to enhance proposals or projects. The displays demonstrate earthquake engineering principles, practices, or its history. These exhibits creatively fulfill the requirement of funding sources to make research results available to the general public. With funding from SCEC, OES, and NSF, models and interactive displays were created for a children's museum by CUREE for an exhibit called ShakeZone. To appeal to a wide range of age groups, these exhibits were designed to be both interactive and visually appealing.

The model makers at Graphic Blade Studios used photos to create a precise model of the collapsed Northridge Meadows apartment complex.

Some exhibits created by CUREE were funded by private organizations for display within their headquarters. These have included displays on seismic disasters represented by historical stamps, an 80 foot mural on natural disasters, and a variable frequency shake table (shown here) that demonstrates with the models and accelerograph dynamic response.

Visitors examine models of apartment buildings with tuck-under garage parking, shown with and without retrofit.

CUSTOM DESIGNED


2013

Establishing Guidelines for Assessment and Repair for Earthquake DamageThe goal of the project was to produce objectively based guidelines that would be used after earthquakes to help assess damage and determine associated repairs. The motivation for the California Earthquake Authority to fund such a guideline was the destruction of the 1994 Northridge Earthquake, which raised questions on how to recognize the difference between cosmetic versus structural damage, and how to make that determination. The guidelines are available through the CUREE website and have been used thousands of times by insurance companies in training programs.

Earthquake Ground Motions and Damage Potential

Fireplaces and Chimneys

Floor, Ceiling, and Roofs

The content of this document is based upon the most current engineering research and best practices related to assessment and repair of earthquake damage in woodframe construction. The target audience of these General Guidelines is homeowners, contractors, insurance claims representatives, and non-engineers involved in working with technical consultants and/or post-earthquake damage assessment of woodframe construction.

Geotechnical AspectsMechanical, Electrical, and

Plumbing Systems

Foundations and Slab-On-Grade

Dr. John Osteraas (Exponent) served as lead author and editor of these General Guidelines. Key contributiong authors were David Bonowitz, Brian McDonald, Akshay Gupta, John Wren, Joel Wolf John Fessler, Allison Faris, and Daniel Whang.

Walls


2013

Simulation of the Seismic Performance of Nonstructural SystemsNSF awarded a $3.6 million grant to the University of Nevada, Reno (UNR) to study the seismic performance of ceiling-piping-partition nonstructural systems. The subsystem and system-level full-scale experiments are being conduced at NEES equipment sites at UNR and University at Buffalo, while UC San Diego, Cornell, Rutherford & Chekene, Georgia Tech, North Carolina State University, and North Carolina A & T are also involved. CUREE is providing management, contracting, and education and outreach services, including setting up and maintaining the project website.

www.nees-nonstructural.org

Professors Tara Hutchinson (UCSD) and Andre Filiatrault (UB-SUNY) inspect the failure of a pipe connection.

Testing of full-scale partitions, suspended ceilings, and sprinkler piping layouts mounted on multiple shake tables at the University of Nevada, Reno.

The Nonstructural Component Simulator (NCS), and the two high performance six-degrees-of-freedom shake tables at the University at Buffalo-SUNY NEES site were used to test on partition walls.

Nonstructural damage within test structure.

The dimensions of the test bed structure are 23 ft (H) x 12 ft (W) x 60 ft (L)


2013

Seismic Performance Assessment in Dense Urban EnvironmentsThis project focuses on documenting and understanding the seismic performance of soil-foundation-structure interaction systems (SFSI) within dense urban environments. The NSF award to UC Berkeley involves testing using the centrifuge at NEES UC Davis. UC San Diego, University at Buffalo, and California Polytechnic State Institute at San Luis Obispo are also involved. CUREE designed and maintains the project website, as well as providing education and outreach services for this project.

www.nees-cityblock.org

The NEES City Block team make adjustments to the test specimen as they prepare for the next series of centrifuge tests at the NEES@UCDavis facility.

Drawing showing the soil's eye view of soil-structure interaction in a dense urban environment.

- R. Reitherman

3D Autocad images used to build the models visually before actual model building occurs to allow for more effective planning of model positioning, rack design, and placement of sensors.

- source: Jonathan Lund

Student researcher Nicholas Trombetta (UCSD) points out some details of the specimen shown on the live video relay to Professor Jonathan Bray, principal investigator on this project.

The UC Davis centrifuge has the largest radius and platform area of any geotechinical centrifuge in the US and can carry 5 ton payloads to 75 g at its effective radius of 8.5 m.


2013

The NEHRP Consultants Joint VentureCUREE, in partnership with ATC, formed the NEHRP Consultants Joint Venture, which, after a competitive process, was awarded a multi-year contract with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to be on-call to conduct NIST-defined projects. To date, seven of the thirty projects have resulted in NEHRP Seismic Design Technical Briefs, practical guides for engineers, one of the ways NIST as lead agency for NEHRP disseminates the information of NEHRP-funded research.

www.nehrp-consultants.org

Seismic Design of Steel Special Moment Frames

Seismic Design of Cast-in-Place Concrete Special Structural Walls

and Coupling Beams

Seismic Design of Reinforced Concrete Special Moment Frames

Seismic Design of Cast-in-Place Concrete Diaphragms,

Chords, and Collectors

Seismic Design of Reinforced Concrete Mat Foundations

Seismic Design of Composite Steel Deck and Concrete-filled

Diaphragms

Nonlinear Structural Analysis For Seismic Design

The Technical Brief series was originally proposed by a group of nationally recognized earthquake professionals in 2003 in ATC-57, The Missing Piece: Improving Seismic Design and Construction Practices, to help address topics of interest to earthquake professionals,

primarily those in the design and construction industries. Some of the topics covered thus far are shown above.


2013

The Golden Gate Bridge Outdoor ExhibitionThe Informal Science Education Program within NSF awarded the Golden Gate Bridge, Highway and Transportation District (GGBHTD) $3 million to establish a permanent outdoor exhibition at the Golden Gate Bridge to give the millions of people who visit the Bridge each year insights about its engineering, construction, and history. The project has education and outreach as the principal focus. CUREE serves as the project manager and the lead exhibit developer, working with evaluative and summative assessment components, organizations in site planning approvals, and coordinating an international meeting of other major public works agencies from within the U.S. and around the world.

The collection of exhibits, including this bronze tactile-readable tabletop model of the Golden Gate Bridge (above), needed to be designed to withstand both harsh weather conditions and the interaction of visitors of all ages and physical limitations. It was also necessary to address the communication issues presented by a widely varied international audience.

CUREE member Princeton University provided an opportunity for their students to design and help manufacture several of the exhibits. Princeton under- graduate student Elizabeth Deir stands next to the torsional resistance exhibit. A close-up of the deck models that she designed is shown below.

(Left) Original bridge design; (right) with wind retrofit bracing that increased torsional stiffness.

source: Jorge Lee (GGBHTD)

An assortment of covers from past CUREE calendars.

adapted from the 2013 curee calendar illustrated essays … · adapted from the 2013 curee calendar...

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