Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research Center

“Large-Scale Shake Table Testing for the Assessment of Soil-Foundation-Structure System Response for Seismic Safety of DOE Facilities”

Historically, the U.S. DOE has been at the forefront of developing engineering design standards related to natural phenomenon hazards in support of ensuring resilient facilities across the full DOE enterprise of sites and facilities. DOE standard 1020, originated in the 1980’s, was one of the first examples of a risk-informed, performance-based seismic design standard that provided DOE facility owners with a rational approach to selecting facility performance goals. More recently, through the DOE Exascale Computing Program, advanced earthquake simulation software, utilizing the latest high-performance computing capabilities, is advancing the ability to simulate earthquake hazard and risk.

As part of DOE’s overall support of advanced capabilities for earthquake risk characterization and mitigation, a major new experimental facility has been developed in partnership between Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of Nevada, Reno. This facility will provide a unique new U.S. capability for understanding the phenomenon of Soil-Structure-Interaction (SSI) and for generating critical data for validation of computer code simulations of nonlinear SSI.  

This workshop, which will be held virtually during May 17-18 2021, will bring together a group of international experts from the research and practitioner communities in the U.S. and Japan, to discuss state-of-the-art experimental techniques and emerging instrumentation technologies for large-scale SSI experiments that can produce unique experimental data to advance knowledge in natural hazards. The generated experimental data followed by research and development activities will ultimately result in updates to the technical standards and design guides, and build confidence in advanced nonlinear simulation techniques.

Abstracts are invited for presentations in the following areas within the common theme of “large-scale shake table tests” to study:

• R&D activities related to resiliency of nuclear facilities against natural phenomenon hazards
• Probabilistic Risk Assessment (PRA) advancements
• Soil-foundation-structure system analysis considering interaction
• Advanced simulations and validations
• Assessment of areas of uncertainty and quantification
• State-of-the-art experimental techniques
• Emerging instrumentation technologies
• Large scale shake table facilities, design basis and performance objectives, experimental capabilities, example recent projects
• Technical standard developments
• Other areas related to large-scale shake table testing

For additional information, please contact the workshop co-chairs: Dr. Ramin Motamed (Associate Professor, University of Nevada Reno) and Dr. David McCallen (Professor, University of Nevada Reno).