麻豆影院

While California and other seismically active parts of the U.S. haven鈥檛 had a major earthquake in over two decades, the next one could be particularly devastating.

It鈥檚 a problem that can be found up and down the coast from Los Angeles to Anchorage and it means that major cities in that area could see loss, not only to life and property, but to their local economies and housing supply. But addressing the issue isn鈥檛 cheap and owners face little motivation to update their buildings, which creates a pressing engineering and policy problem.

CU 麻豆影院 Associate Professor Abbie Liel has studied the issue through a CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation. Her work uses simulation to quantify how valuable retrofitting buildings would be for building owners and communities and how much work is actually needed to prevent some of the worst-case scenarios. So far, the work has shown that retrofitting these buildings is particularly effective at preventing loss of life and is a great aid to public safety.

鈥淲e think some of these buildings could be devastatingly deadly in the next earthquake 鈥� but don鈥檛 have good tools for understanding which are most vulnerable,鈥� she said. 鈥淭he work looks to fix that and define what you can accomplish with a retrofit because we know that we can solve these problems. So, if you retrofit all of these buildings in your city, what can you accomplish in terms of seismic performance? Logic says you can learn something by individual analysis, but you have to scale that to understand implications at the community level to make a case for retrofit.鈥�

recognizes talented young faculty members with grants to support outstanding research projects and to encourage the integration of teaching and research. It is one of the most prestigious grants a faculty member can receive. Liel鈥檚 is set to finish this spring. She said the award was a chance for her to integrate various pieces of her work to provide context and address what the engineering community thinks is one of the biggest seismic safety concern right now.

Testing for these kinds of questions isn鈥檛 easy because every building is, essentially, built differently. You can鈥檛 test a building in one city and come up with an answer to those questions for every other building along the coast for example. Some buildings need reinforced walls or other large-scale work, while others may be fine with something smaller.

鈥淥ne of the challenges for structural and civil engineering is that everything we build is totally different. We don鈥檛 build 100,000 widgets where we can test one of them a thousand times and know the other 99,999 are good,鈥� said Liel who is based in the Civil, Environmental and Architectural Department. 鈥淎ll buildings are special children in their own way and figuring out how to understand, characterize and asses a building has its own challenges.鈥�

With long-term research, there are听always slight changes in direction and this project has been no different. Los Angeles recently announced plans to mandate retrofit of these non-ductile concrete buildings over the next 30 years and Liel said she has now found her work heading away from the question of 鈥渨hy should we鈥� to the question of 鈥渉ow best鈥� when it comes to retrofitting. The difference being a policy perspective and one she was eager to explore.听

鈥淲here LA goes, often the other communities in southern California go too and San Francisco appears to be headed the same direction as well. So, it鈥檚 no longer about convincing the biggest city they need to do this,鈥� she said. 鈥淣ow we are saying 鈥榶ou could do it better this way,鈥� or how 鈥榟ow do you prioritize this in the face of other problems in a state like California where there are big wildfires听for example.鈥�

The NSF award has a required teaching and education component to it, which Liel worked into her probability and statistics class. During the semester, she took students to a Habitat for Humanity building project to get their hands a little dirty on a construction site. She said the combination of experience building structures and the end community benefit made for a fun project incorporating ideas about risk and uncertainty.

Liel said she is unsure where the work will go from here but is eager to continue working on the policy aspect. She said this kind of project was why she got into engineering in the first place.

鈥ㄢ�淚 wouldn鈥檛 be engineer if I couldn鈥檛 do something where I could see and have an influence on people. My motivation for the details comes from a desire to help protect people and communities. Those are the kinds of problems I have to work on to be happy in my career,鈥� she said.