NEES to Celebrate Grand Opening Nov. 15
released 11.04.04
Contact
Rick Kubetz
Office of Engineering Communications
rkubetz@uiuc.edu
217.244.7716
CHAMPAIGN, IL —
Recently, earthquake engineers and computer scientists around the country created an "earthquake" and studied its effect on the structure of a one-story frame building. However, one column of the building was at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), and another at the University of Colorado-Boulder. Meanwhile, the building's central support was simulated on a computer at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at UIUC.
The above was the first scientific experiment conducted using the NEESgrid, the cyberinfrastructure for National Science Foundation's (NSF) George E. Brown, Jr. Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES). NEESgrid enables researchers at different institutions to remotely interact with each other, collaborate in research, execute experiments, and publish results.
On Monday, Nov. 15, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, in cooperation with NSF, will celebrate the grand opening of the nation's first engineering cyberinfrastructure in a national telecast linking the 15 NEESgrid sites, along with the inauguration of the UIUC NEES site, the MUST-SIM Facility.
"During the grand opening, from 10 a.m. to 12:30 p.m., a model of the Santa Monica Freeway will be subjected to laboratory testing combined with computer simulation," said Amr Elnashai, an engineering professor and director of the NEES facility and director of the Mid-America Earthquake Center at Illinois. Elnashai was also a principal investigator for the NEES Multi-Axial Full-Scale Sub-Structures Testing and Simulation (MUST-SIM) facility located within the Newmark Civil Engineering Laboratory (205 N. Mathews Ave., Urbana). At 12:30 p.m., the 15 NEES sites around the country will link to MUST-SIM via a telecast with the NSF in Washington, D.C. The grand opening will include demonstrations from three NEES facilities to showcase capabilities of the NEESgrid.
"This is also the grand opening for the MUST-SIM facility," Elnashai added. "Our featured portion of the event will be to reproduce the forces that produced failure of the freeway piers, as observed in the Northridge earthquake of Jan. 17, 1994. Using our testing equipment, we will replicate the forces on a full-sized pier—16 feet high by 2 feet in diameter—to demonstrate how they failed during the earthquake event.
"Watching the multi-axial equipment rock, twist, and destroy a 25,000-pound reinforced concrete column is an impressive sight," Elnashai said. "But by replicating the catastrophic failure of the structure, using state-of-the-art hybrid (experimental-analytical modeling), we are able to design against such failures in the future."
According to Elnashai, "NEES will function as a network of laboratories to enable researchers to operate equipment, conduct and observe testing, and view results from remote locations, a revolutionary concept that will enable a new level of collaboration among earthquake engineers worldwide."
"NEESgrid is NSF's first engineering cyberinfrastructure project," says Bill Spencer, who is the Nathan M. and Anne M. Newmark Endowed Chair of Civil Engineering at the U of I and principal investigator for NEESgrid. Spencer, who is the deputy director of the MUST-SIM facility, said that, by providing common tools that allow individual researchers access to the resources and experiences of a large part of the earthquake engineering community, NEESgrid is making possible research capabilities that have not been available in the past. All of this is accessible through a simple Web interface. "Rather than having to worry about the software, NEESgrid allows researchers to focus on the earthquake engineering challenges at hand."
NEES is the product of $82 million in NSF funds—the first major research equipment project in engineering ever funded by the government foundation. NEES is named for the late Congressman George E. Brown, Jr., (D-CA) a strong advocate for continuing investments in science and technology and the Ranking Minority Member of the Committee on Science in the U.S. House of Representatives at the time of his death in 1999.
A technical presentation of the MUST-SIM facility and equipment will run from 10 to 10:50 a.m., followed by tours of the facility, including a brand new state-of-the-art visualization studio. The formal grand opening program will begin at noon, prior to the NSF telecast. Invited speakers include Representative Tim Johnson, Illinois Senator Rick Winkel, and Representative Naomi Jakobsson, UI Vice Chancellor for Research Chip Zukoski, and College of Engineering Dean David Daniel.
NEESgrid was officially launched on Oct. 1, 2004, representing the culmination of the efforts of a multidisciplinary team led by National Center for Supercomputing Applications, to develop a national virtual collaboratory for earthquake engineering. NEESgrid enables geographically distributed teams to efficiently plan, perform, and publish earth engineering research, facilitating the development of increasingly complex, comprehensive, and accurate models of the seismic performance of civil infrastructure.
The MUST-SIM facility at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign allows researchers to combine state-of-the-art computer simulation with laboratory testing for a complete picture of what happens to structures and building materials during an earthquake. Its construction was supported by a $3.4 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE), enabling CEE to become one of 15 equipment sites nationwide that are part of the George E. Brown, Jr., Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES). The NEES program at the U of I is a team effort, involving structural engineering faculty as well as geotechnical and construction management professors from the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and colleagues from Mechanical and Industrial Engineering.
The NEES MUST-SIM project for Reinforced Concrete (RC) Pier Test took place on October 15, 2004 in the Newmark Civil Engineering Lab at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. A video of the testing can be viewed at https://netfiles.uiuc.edu/sjkim4/Download/video/01_PierTest_Far.wmv.
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