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2024 Fazlur R. Khan Distinguished Lecture – James M. Ricles, November 20, 2024

November 15, 2024

New Lecture: Real-time Hybrid Simulation: Cyber-Physical Structural Experimentation for Improving Civil Infrastructure Resilience to Natural Hazards

Stakeholders are demanding that the performance of the built civil infrastructure be more resilient to natural hazards in order to reduce their impact on society. Performance-based engineering is a means to attempt to meet performance objectives associated with prescribed levels of hazards. A viable technique to meet validation requirements for performance-engineered structural systems is to use real-time hybrid simulation (RTHS) to perform cyber-physical experiments. The complete system is involved in these simulations, where selected components of the system are modeled physically while others are modeled numerically using computational models. The modeling of the former in the physical domain is required because accurate computational models do not exist for these components. In such studies response modification devices can be coupled to a system that is subjected to a prescribed hazard with a specific return period, enabling system performance under prescribed levels of realistic hazard demands to be established. The talk will present results from recent efforts that the presenter and the research team at the NSF Natural Hazards Engineering Research Infrastructure (NHERI) Lehigh Experimental Facility have completed to advance large-scale multi-directional RTHS. The purpose of these advancements is to enable the assessment of the response of civil infrastructure systems to natural hazards. The advancements and their formulations will be introduced, followed by the presentation and discussion of their application to perform multi-physics RTHS of structural systems under earthquake and wind natural hazards. The studies to be presented include response of offshore wind turbine systems subject to normal and extreme conditions, aeroelastic and earthquake response of tall buildings, efficacy of nonlinear viscous damper systems in enhancing the seismic resiliency of low rise buildings, and simulations with soil-structure interaction effects that involve neural networks and machine learning. These studies demonstrate that RTHS can accurately simulate complex responses to multiple hazards in real-time, providing insights for improving structural resilience. The talk will conclude with future directions that are envisioned to take place in cyber-physical structural simulation. 

1 PDH will be awarded to eligible attendees for each lecture
(Minimum Zoom time of 55 minutes is required)

For more info about the Khan Lecture Series, please visit http://www.lehigh.edu/frkseries.