Lehigh’s ATLSS Engineering Research Center, the nation’s leading laboratory for the large-scale testing of bridges, buildings and other structures, is building a state-of-the-art lab to study how large structures perform under earthquakes of the largest magnitude.

ATLSS – Advanced Technology for Large Structural Systems – has received a $2.6-million grant from the George E. Brown Jr. Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES). ATLSS will also receive $344,000 from the Pennsylvania Infrastructure Technology Alliance and $228,000 from Lehigh.

The grant is part of a 15-year initiative by the National Science Foundation, through which Lehigh and 14 other universities in the “NEES Network” will conduct research to develop cost-effective ways of mitigating earthquake destruction. Each university will build an Equipment Site; each site will be commissioned by Oct. 1, 2004, and operate under NSF sponsorship for 10 years.

“This grant will enable Lehigh and the 14 other universities with NEES collaborating Equipment Sites to enter the next generation of earthquake engineering research,” said Jim Ricles, professor of civil and environmental engineering and principal investigator for Lehigh’s NEES Equipment Site grant.
 
Each university, said Ricles, will perform a different aspect of research. Their efforts will be coordinated through a Consortium Developer in Richmond, Calif.   Under the grant, ATLSS will build a real-time multidirectional testing lab that can simulate the impact of earthquakes on large structures and monitor the response of the structures to quake “loads.”

The new lab will be linked to the NEES network through the Mid-Atlantic GigaPop Internet 2 (MAGPI). The connection will enable engineers at NEES sites and other remote locations to operate experiments on the new facility. Likewise, ATLSS will be able to “broadcast” its experiments and share data in real time by streaming video over the Internet, said Ricles. The telepresence capabilities of the Lehigh NEES Equipment Site will enable the public to take part in earthquake engineer research, including students at Lehigh and other universities, K-12 students, and practicing engineers.

“The NEES grant is one of the biggest equipment grants ATLSS has received in its 16-year history,” said ATLSS director Richard Sause. “It enables us to retain our competitive edge in earthquake engineering research and to interact with the other major players in the field.”

The goal of the overall NEES program is to learn to mitigate the effects of earthquakes by using new materials and new building methods, and by gaining a better understanding of the interactions between structures and the soils that support and abut them.

ATLSS researchers, in addition to developing new testing techniques that integrate experimental and analytical research, will explore the use of advanced sensors – including MEMS-based (micro-electrical mechanical systems) accelerometers, piezoelectric transducers, and fiber optic strain gages – to monitor the performance of structures. And they will experiment with the wireless transmission of the data retrieved by those sensors.

The new equipment provided by the NEES grant will enhance ATLSS’s facilities, which now include a strong floor that covers 372 square meters and a multi-directional reaction wall, largest in North America, that stands 15 meters tall at one end and decreases, in four incremental steps over a length of 32 meters, to heights of 12.2 meters, 9.1 meters and 6.1 meters. The actuators, hydraulic systems modification and remaining equipment provided by the grant will give the lab new dynamic capabilities, enabling it to simulate and sustain the effects of the Maximum Considered Earthquake (MCE)  for a duration of over 30 seconds. The MCE event is an earthquake of such large magnitude that it occurs only once in 2,500 years. In an MCE event, structures properly designed by current standards are expected be on the verge of collapse.

In its brief history, ATLSS has become synonymous with the large-scale stress testing of large structures and their components. Experiments performed at the research center can simulate in six months or a year the total punishment that a bridge, for example, would sustain from 30 years of traffic. Structures tested at ATLSS include cross-sections of prototype double-hulled U.S. Navy combat ships and a 60-foot-long, two-lane-wide prototype of New York City’s Williamsburg Bridge deck.

Currently, ATLSS engineers are conducting tests on a full-scale deck prototype of New York’s Bronx-Whitestone Bridge. Besides Ricles and Sause, the investigators taking part in Lehigh’s NEES project include Profs. Clay Naito, Sibel Pamukcu and Yunfeng Zhang, all in the department of civil and environmental engineering. Project managers are Dr. John Bower, ATLSS deputy director, and Robert Alpago, ATLSS associate director. Frank Stokes, ATLSS research scientist, is serving as lab manager, and Peter Bryan, ATLSS systems manager, as information technologist. Dr. Xiaoping Zhang has recently joined ATLSS to serve as a research scientist for the project.
 
Besides Lehigh and Illinois, the universities taking part in the NEES initiative include Brigham Young University, the University of Colorado at Boulder, Cornell University, the University of Minnesota at Twin Cities, the University of Nevada at Reno, Oregon State University, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, SUNY-Buffalo, the University of Texas at Austin, UCLA, UC-Berkeley, UC-Davis and UC-San Diego.