OU NEES Page

The family of NEES earthquake engineering researchers at the University of Oklahoma extends its deepest sympathies to the victims of the October 2005 Kashmir earthquake.

Our team of faculty and students will continue to dedicate our research efforts in earthquake engineering towards the goal of a day when all of the world's peoples are protected from the incredible destructive power of earthquakes.

NEES at the University of Oklahoma

This website documents past, present, and future work on the NSF NEES (Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation) project at the University of Oklahoma. It presents a functional prototype for the Simulation Tools and Results Web Archives as outlined in the prototype components of Tasks 2.3 of the NEES Systems Integration Project.

This prototype implementation is intended to serve as a starting point for future iterations towards a production-quality Simulation web portal that includes both static content (e.g., links to tools, researchers, and results) and dynamic capabilities (e.g., remote execution of simulation tools).

What is NEES?

NEES is a network of earthquake engineering research facilities integrated into a collaborative fabric via the novel application of appropriate information technology.

What is nees@Oklahoma?

NEES.ou.edu is a computational simulation-oriented site at the University of Oklahoma, where researchers, practitioners, and students of engineering can find useful information on the application of computational engineering techniques within the NEES project.

What is the Role of Computational Simulation in Earthquake Engineering?

There are four primary roles for computational simulation in relation to laboratory experiments in earthquake engineering, namely:

a priori simulation in support of experimental design optimization
a posteriori simulation in support of experimental interpretation
concurrent simulation that permits hybrid numeric/laboratory testing
purely computational simulation that replaces experimental efforts

The first role is an essential element of any large-scale experimental enterprise, because current laboratory experiments in earthquake engineering are large and complex systems, which benefit greatly from a priori computational simulation efforts performed to optimize the associated experimental designs, e.g., determining proper locations of sensors, predicting accurate estimates of significant physical responses, estimating time and financial resources required to construct and deploy the experiment, etc.

The second role is a traditional one for computational simulation, and it generally involves the use of special-purpose tools for data reduction, data mining, and solution interpretation, e.g., interactive visualization applications capable of rendering complex physical systems used in engineering fields. While the second role is one of long standing in all engineering communities, there are many important avenues of research in this arena (especially those involving the effective mining of experimental and computational data) that are still many open research questions in need of substantial future research and development efforts supporting this role for computational simulation.

The third role represents an emerging opportunity to fuse computational results with experimental testing, and is already commonly used in many areas of earthquake engineering research, e.g., pseudodynamic testing, where the inertia of the structure is modeled using the computer so it can be re-applied to the structure quasi-statically. Within the distributed nature of the NEES project, this role represents one of the most exciting research venues for computational simulation in structural engineering.

The fourth role is gaining in importance, and will be important in the future of earthquake engineering, but its full utility is currently hampered in many cases by imprecise knowledge of the relevant physics (e.g., soil liquefaction problems) or by uncertainty in material or geometric information (e.g., tsunami models arising from deep-ocean earthquakes). Where it is possible to gain an accurate understanding of the physics of the problem, it is possible to model large and complex problems on the computer that cannot reasonably be simulated using current experimental techniques. This role was one of the motivating principles behind the funding of the NEES project, and the range of problems where computational simulation can serve as an equal partner to laboratory experimentation continues to grow with time.

This work has been sponsored by the National Science Foundation under the Systems Integration Award of the NEES MRE, and by the University of Oklahoma School of Civil Engineering and Environmental Science