Yahya Kurama
University of Notre Dame, IN·Engineering
After a major earthquake, a building that stays standing but cannot be used for months still costs a community dearly. Engineers increasingly aim for functional recovery, meaning buildings that can quickly return to service after a disaster.
- Fields
Engineering
Materials Science
- Topics
earthquake engineering
seismic design
buckling-restrained braced frame
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Apr 2027
What they work on
- Design and characterize a non-proprietary precast concrete buckling-restrained brace with threaded gap-joint connections that can be replaced after an earthquake, through tests of isolated braces and their connections.
- Develop experimentally validated numerical models that predict three-dimensional stress gradients and damage that could cause early brace failure, and evaluate design-basis models for multi-story braced frames.
- Test the seismic performance and brace replacement of a three-story precast BRB frame building under multi-directional shaking on the six-degree-of-freedom outdoor shake table at UC San Diego.
More about the research
This project designs and tests a precast concrete building frame whose key damage-absorbing parts can be swapped out after an earthquake. No comprehensive U.S. research yet exists on how precast buckling-restrained braced (BRB) frames perform in earthquakes.
Why it matters
Buildings that can be repaired quickly after an earthquake could reduce the long shutdowns and economic losses that follow major quakes. A low-cost, replaceable precast concrete brace validated in full-scale shake-table tests could give engineers and the precast concrete industry a practical option for earthquake-prone cities. Publicly shared data and design methods could also support updated seismic design practice.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Tara Hutchinson
University of California-San Diego, CA·Engineering
Test individual wall lines and building components of cold-formed steel framing to separate how designated shear walls, gravity walls, finishes and partitions each resist earthquake loads.
Matthew Bandelt
New Jersey Institute of Technology, NJ·Engineering·Early-career
Quantify plastic hinge response, how bending zones absorb energy, of HPFRCC components under combined axial load and bending through physical experiments and detailed computer simulations.
Barbara Simpson
Stanford University, CA·Engineering·Early-career
Derive massively parallel algorithms for assembling and solving the equations of motion of earthquake-loaded structures directly on GPUs, so that high-resolution models can run fast enough for real-time testing.
The school
University of Notre Dame: 19 labs on PI Pages, $346M a year on research, 277 research doctorates a year.
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