Two DOE-funded projects — and a bunch of top supercomputers — are converging to improve our understanding of earthquakes and enable the construction of more earthquake-resilient buildings and infrastructure. The first, more grounded project: the Large-Scale Laminar Soil Box System, via which enormous amounts of soil can be shaken by a hydraulic platform to simulate earthquakes’ effects on soil layers; the second project, the ongoing EQSIM project, which aims to simulate earthquakes on supercomputers — and which is learning from the Soil Box results.
“These projects are synergistic,” explained David McCallen, EQSIM leader and a senior scientist at Berkeley Lab, in an interview with Berkeley Lab’s Aliyah Kovner. “The Soil Box System is helping us understand and refine how to model the complex interaction between the soil and a structure. Our objective is to make realistic models of specific interactions — for example, what happens to a 20-story building very near California’s Hayward fault during a large-magnitude earthquake? — and add them to our existing large-scale simulations. We want to model all the way from the fault rupture through the ground to the structure to see how buildings and other infrastructure in an entire region will respond.”
The Soil Box — which just opened via a demonstration event a couple of weeks ago — is 15 feet tall. 21.5 feet wide, and can hold up to 350 tons of soil on its 50-ton shaking platform, which is capable of exerting up to 1.25 million pounds of force on the soil it supports. “A soil box and shake table of this size and complexity are not something you order from an online catalog,” said Ian Buckle, PI for the Soil Box and a professor in UNR’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. “There are very few organizations or companies with the knowledge and expertise to do this, so we decided to do it ourselves with our own expertise and resources. This design not only allows us to work with large-scale structural models that can be placed on top of the soil, but also the large scale allows more realistic soil properties to be modeled.”
The researchers on EQSIM are excited to work with that data. EQSIM’s recent simulations have been running on supercomputers like Summit (Oak Ridge National Laboratory) and Perlmutter (Berkeley Lab), both top-ten systems on the most recent Top500 list. Soon, they’re slated to begin work on Frontier, the first official exascale supercomputer, which just launched this spring at Oak Ridge. The researchers plan to incorporate Soil Box results into their new research on Frontier and make the resulting datasets available to the broader research community via the Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research (PEER) Center’s open-access simulation database.
To learn more about this research, read the reporting from Berkeley Lab’s Aliyah Kovner here.