This award provides funding to the University of California, Davis (UCD), to upgrade the experimental capabilities of the George E. Brown, Jr. Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES) geotechnical centrifuge facility at UCD that will be operated by NEES Consortium, Inc., as a national shared use facility during FY 2005 - FY 2014. The major equipment at the UCD NEES site includes the 9-meter geotechnical centrifuge, 2D shaker, in-flight robot, hinged plate container, flexible shear beam container, large inventory of transducers, imaging equipment, and distributed high-speed wireless data acquisition system. Under this award, the following equipment will be purchased for this site: wireless master radio, amplifiers, and researcher PC worktablets. The master radio, the second one at this site, will be used in the model preparation area to enable NEES researchers to communicate with the wireless communication module/sensor manager independently of ongoing experiments on the centrifuge. It will enable researchers to calibrate sensors in the lab and take data during 1g testing processes such as consolidation. This system will be left connected to the network to support remote training so that researchers can learn to use the software and hardware independently of the primary centrifuge system. UCD will purchase 96 amplifier modules to support strain gauges, load cells, displacement sensors, and other miscellaneous transducers that will be used in model testing. The two tablet PCs will be available for use by researchers during model preparation and testing. These tablet PCs will be configured with software to access the centrifuge data acquisition systems, as well as the data repository and site specifications database via the wireless network. This equipment will be available to the earthquake engineering research community through the NEES Consortium, Inc., UCD NEES facility. This award is funded by the NSF NEES Major Research Equipment and Facilities Construction (MREFC) project and is a component of the National Earthquake Hazards Reduction Program (NEHRP).
