Upcoming Projects

PI
 

Co-PI(s)

Daniel Cox, Oregon State

Rakesh Gupta, Oregon State
John van de Lindt, Colorado State
Francisco Aguiniga TAMU-Kingsville
Title NEESR II: Mitigating the Risk of Coastal Infrastructure through Understanding Tsunami-Structure Interaction and Modeling
What The goal of this project is to model building damage by studying water flow and debris hazard of collapsed buildings in the flooded areas. This will help us understand the expected damage to cities and town and to design buildings to withstand these forces.

As a first step of this new approach, we will focus on residential (light-frame wood) buildings which make up 90% of the building stock in the US and are where people spend approximately half of the hours in their day, Because of the sheer number of residential buildings in these coastal communities, understanding tsunami impact on these structures and the expected damage level is necessary to reduce damage and loss of life.

Phase I of this project took place in the Large Wave Flume in FY2009. Phase II will take place in FY2010 in the Tsunami Wave Basin. Their work will focus on tsunami structure tests at the 1:4 scale, and utilize the three-dimensional ability of the TWB wavemaker to better understand the effects of shadowing by multiple objects NSF award abstract

When Spring/Summer 2010
Equipment Tsunami Wave Basin
PI
James Kaihatu, Texas A&M
Title NEESR Payload: Determining the Added Hazard Potential of Tsunamis by Interaction with Ocean Swell and Wind Waves
What This payload project will investigate how tsunami waves are amplified by interaction with ocean swell and wind waves. Understanding how different ocean conditions can change the destructive power of tsunami waves is crucial in planning evacuation strategies. The TWB wavemaker will be directed to produce these novel conditions and the wave climate and water velocities at various locations will be measured.

The project will share instrumentation and space with the Cox NEESR project. NSF award abstract

When Spring 2010
Equipment Tsunami Wave Basin
PI
Jennifer Irish, Texas A&M
Title NEESR Payload: Dissipation of Long-Wave Energy by Discontinuous Macro-Roughness Representing Forested Areas
What This payload project will utilize the north portion of the TWB to investigate macro-roughness elements and their affect on tsunami runup. Specifically, the project will be investigating the impact of coastal vegetation on tsunami wave dissipation by placing large scale macro-roughness elements in the basin.

The project will utilize instrumentation setup by the NEESR project to measure the wave climate, as well as velocity measurements at specific locations. NSF award abstract

When Summer 2010
Equipment Tsunami Wave Basin
PI

Co-PI(s)

Hermann Fritz, Georgia Tech

Zygmunt Kowali and James Beget,
University of Alaska Fairbanks
Title NEESR-CR: Tsunami Generation by Landslides: Integrating Laboratory Scale Experiments, Numerical Models and Natural Scale Applications
What This project's long-term goal is to transform assessment and mitigation of the landslide tsunami hazard through hybrid modeling of landslide tsunami evolution in real world scenarios, where the generation, propagation, and runup stages overlap. Rare field measurements are mostly limited to landslide scarp, deposit, tsunami runup, and eyewitness accounts, while critically important data related to the landslide motion and tsunami evolution is lacking. The goal of the research is to compensate for missing data by combined physical and numerical modeling of fully three-dimensional landslide tsunami scenarios. NSF award abstract
When Summer/Fall 2010
Equipment Tsunami Wave Basin

Learn more about...
     Past projects
     Electronic Notebook records of projects
     Information for prospective researchers