NSF Award to Improve Safety of Buildings, Bridges in Earthquake Zones

A $502,000 award from the National Science Foundation will deepen Clint Wood’s research on imaging techniques to improve the safety of buildings, bridges and roads, especially those in earthquake zones.

Wood, an associate professor of civil engineering, is a geotechnical engineering specialist. His research focuses on characterizing the layering and engineering properties of soil and rock formations. He uses seismometers to non-invasively measure low-intensity stress waves as they propagate through and interact with soil and rock beneath the surface.

Clinton Wood

Measuring the frequency and wavelength of these stress waves enables Wood to create images of subsurface structures and estimate the shear wave velocity of soil and rock formations. This shear-wave velocity information helps seismologists and engineers understand and predict ground motions from earthquakes and helps architects and engineers design earthquake-resistant buildings, bridges and roads.

With the NSF award, Wood will develop improved inversion schemes, complex algorithms used to determine shear wave velocity. The new schemes will facilitate more realistic subsurface models, which are critical to understanding earthquake-related phenomena such as liquefaction – soil becoming liquid due to ground shaking  – and bedrock rippability – whether bedrock can be removed efficiently by large bulldozers.

“Other disciplines, especially medicine, have made giant leaps forward with non-invasive imaging, but the world of in-situ soil characterization remains mired in the past and continues to rely heavily on empirical approaches that were developed more than 100 years ago,” Wood said. “As the civil and geotechnical engineering profession moves forward, the advancement of non-invasive methods is critical to meeting the challenges of tomorrow in a cost-effective manner.”

In addition, the NSF award will help Wood and his research team promote the use of non-invasive methods. The project will also include an international student exchange program and provide training to practicing engineers through a speakers bureau.

Wood’s research expertise has sent him all over the world, as part of several teams sponsored by the NSF Geotechnical Extreme Events Reconnaissance, or GEER. These teams perform reconnaissance research following extreme natural disasters, such as earthquakes, tsunamis and hurricanes.

A short video about Wood’s research can be viewed at Research Frontiers, the home of research news at the University of Arkansas.