Barbara Simpson
Stanford University, CA·Engineering·Early-career
Earthquakes can damage tall buildings so severely that a whole city struggles to recover. To study that risk, engineers often link a real physical test in the lab to a computer model of the rest of the structure and run both together.
- Fields
Engineering
Computer Science
Earth & Environmental Science
- Topics
earthquake engineering
structural engineering
natural hazards
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Sep 2027
What they work on
- 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.
- Develop semi-discrete time integration schemes, methods for advancing a simulation step by step in time, that remain efficient on GPUs despite nonlinearities and mixed structural element formulations.
- Build an event-driven, GPU-adapted architecture for real-time hybrid simulation, where a physical laboratory specimen and a numerical model exchange data while the experiment runs.
- Demonstrate the approach in a tiered testing program simulating realistic tall-building seismic response including soil-structure interaction, using NHERI resources at Berkeley, Lehigh and DesignSafe.
More about the research
The catch is that more detailed models run slower, which makes real-time coupling impractical. One effect is routinely left out for exactly this reason: soil-structure interaction, the way the ground beneath a building and the building itself push on each other during shaking. This project lays algorithmic groundwork for running such simulations on graphics processing units (GPUs), chips originally designed for rendering images, which can carry out thousands of calculations at once.
Why it matters
Tall buildings are difficult to repair once damaged, and losing their function slows recovery after an earthquake. Simulations that are both faster and more detailed, and that include the influence of the underlying soil, could give structural engineers and code committees a more realistic picture of how such buildings behave during shaking. Publicly archived project data could also serve other natural hazards researchers.
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.
Hyoungsu Park
University of Hawaii at Manoa, HI·Engineering
Measure how tsunami-driven debris damming increases forces on the first-floor columns of elevated structures, using experiments in the large wave flume at the Oregon State University NHERI facility.
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.
The school
Stanford University: 87 labs on PI Pages, $1.6B a year on research, 739 research doctorates a year.
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