The Natural Hazards Engineering Research Infrastructure (NHERI) is supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) as a distributed, multi-user national facility to provide the natural hazards engineering research community with access to research infrastructure that includes earthquake and wind engineering experimental facilities, cyberinfrastructure (CI), computational modeling and simulation tools, high performance computing resources, and research data, as well as education and community outreach activities. Originally funded under program solicitations NSF 14-605 and NSF 15-598, NHERI has operated since 2015 through separate, but coordinated, five-year research infrastructure awards for a Network Coordination Office, CI, Computational Modeling and Simulation Center, and Experimental Facilities, including a post-disaster, rapid response research facility. Information about NHERI resources is available at the NHERI web portal (www.DesignSafe-ci.org). Awards made for NHERI contribute to NSF's role in the National Earthquake Hazards Reduction Program (NEHRP) and the National Windstorm Impact Reduction Program (NWIRP). NHERI Experimental Facilities will provide access to their experimental resources, user services, and data management infrastructure for NSF-supported research and education awards. This award will renew the NHERI Experimental Facility at Oregon State University from January 1, 2021, to September 30, 2025. Through this award, Oregon State University will continue to maintain, operate, and enhance the Large Wave Flume and Directional Wave Basin to provide access to experimental equipment, instrumentation, and technical support to enable research to mitigate the impact of natural hazards, such as coastal surge and waves and tsunamis, on the nation’s civil infrastructure and communities. Consistent with the grand research challenges in natural hazards engineering, as outlined in the NHERI Science Plan (https://doi.org/10.17603/ds2-4s85-mc54), the facility will enable new research discoveries that can help protect human life, reduce damage, minimize economic losses, and allow communities to recover more quickly after extreme coastal hazard events. The experimental capabilities will allow researchers to develop new technologies for adaptive engineering to mitigate the effects of coastal hazards. Experimental data generated from the use of this facility will be archived in the Data Depot on the NHERI web portal. The facility will conduct annual user workshops, host Research Experiences for Undergraduate students, and enable the development of K-12 instructional content developed via Research Experiences for Teachers.
The Large Wave Flume and Directional Wave Basin are capable of generating long-period waves for tsunami research and short-crested waves for hurricane wave research and can be used for the study of hydraulic-structure-sediment phenomena, such as tsunami and hurricane inundation dynamics in constructed and natural environments; tsunami and hurricane wave forces on near-coast civil infrastructure; and tsunami and hurricane surge interaction with sediments causing erosion and localized scour. The wave flume is a two-dimensional representation of the coast (looking directly out to sea), eliminating the complexity of longshore currents and wave direction, and allowing a cross-section of test specimens to be studied at scales from approximately 1:50 up to 1:1 (prototype) scale to model wave-structure interaction of building subassemblies, native sediments for beaches and dunes, and live coastal vegetation. The wave basin increases the system complexity to three dimensions by extending laterally, enabling the study of coastal communities and complex harbors when wave direction is important. The wave basin generally requires a decrease in scale by a factor of five (1:250 to 1:5). In addition to these two resources, the facility will provide standard and state-of-the-art instrumentation to assess wave conditions, velocity, and response variables such as stress, strain, load, and sediment transport (scour and erosion).
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
