Civil/Structural Engineer to Present Poster on Seismic Protection at Research Expo 2016

Born and raised in Italy, UC San Diego structural engineering graduate student Elide Pantoli knew she wanted to help people, but also knew didn’t want to be a doctor.

“I don’t like blood, so I knew I wouldn’t go into the medical field,” said Pantoli. “In Italy, there’s an association of doctors that was looking for civil engineers. That’s where I got the idea to study civil engineering.”

Pantoli chose to study civil engineering at the University of Bologna – the oldest university in the world. She knew she wanted to study abroad, and the university offered an exchange program with the University of California school system.

“I applied to study at UC San Diego, and came in 2007-2008,” said Pantoli. “After that, I wanted to stay abroad, so I applied to do research for a year at Columbia University.”

From there, Pantoli returned to start her Ph.D. at UC San Diego in 2010.  She started working on the Large High Performance Outdoor Shake Table (LHPOST) at UC San Diego – the largest outdoor shake table in the world – which provides the earthquake engineering community with a facility that allows the accurate reproduction of severe earthquake ground motions for the seismic testing of very large structures.

Pantoli tested a full-scale five-story building fully outfitted with nonstructural components. Her dissertation focuses on one of these – the precast concrete façade. This is what she will present at Research Expo 2016 (see abstract below).

“There have already been code changes due to this work,” said Pantoli. “All of my papers were published in partnership with industry. They say, here’s a problem, and we try to help them solving it.”

Pantoli is interested in both industry and academia – but her dream is to change engineering education.

“I’ve seen students in their third year that are so frustrated because they still don’t know what they are doing,” said Pantoli.

She is passionate about helping students master a subject.

Register today for Research Expo 2016 to hear more from Pantoli and 200+ engineering graduate students for the Jacobs School of Engineering.

Research Expo also features TED-style talks by faculty highlighting research from our agile research centers and a networking reception with faculty, students, industry partners and alumni.

200. SEISMIC DRIFT COMPATIBLE DESIGN OF ARCHITECTURAL PRECAST CONCRETE CLADDING: TIEBACK CONNECTIONS AND CORNER JOINTS

Department: Structural Engineering
Faculty Advisor(s): Tara C. Hutchinson

Primary Student
Name: Elide Pantoli

Abstract
Architectural precast concrete (APC) cladding is a nonstructural system sensitive to both seismic floor accelerations and story drifts. APC panels must be designed to resist forces in the out-of-plane direction of motion, while they must accommodate in-plane story drifts. This requirement presents specific challenges to engineers, namely the design and detailing of connections intended to allow in-plane drifts (termed ?tiebacks?) and corners of the system. Presently, these important issues are addressed rather broadly in design codes, leaving the details to the discretion and experience of the designer. With the goal of providing practical guidance to designers, system and component tests on representative APC cladding and tieback connections were performed. This poster summarizes key results obtained from these experiments and applies these findings to develop guidelines for drift-compatible design of tieback connections and corner systems.

Industry Application Area(s)
Civil/Structural Engineering

Related Links:

1.    http://bncs.ucsd.edu

Jacobs School Shake Table Featured on NOVA Nov. 6

The shake table at the Englekirk Structural Engineering Center was in the spotlight Nov. 6 on "Making Stuff Safer," a PBS/NOVA show hosted by David Pogue.
One of the show's segments documents how researchers used the facility, which is the largest outdoor shake table in the world, to test so-called wood frame soft-story buildings. The structures, dating back to the 1920s and 1930s, typically have first-floor garages and apartments on the upper floors. There are tens of thousands of these types of buildings throughout California, especially in the San Francisco Bay Area, and the United States.
Engineers used the table to test various seismic retrofits in a 44,000-square-foot building built specifically for the occasion. John Van de Lindt, the principal investigator on the project, secured a $1.24 million grant from the National Science Foundation for the research. His team from Colorado State University is working with Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Cal-Poly Pomona, Western Michigan University and Clemson University. Numerous industry partners, including Simpson Strong-Tie and the Forest Products Laboratory, as well as several other government entities are also collaborating on the tests.
More on "Making Stuff Safer" here.
More on the research here.

Bringing the House Down

It took four tries, but engineers at the Englekirk Structural Engineering Center at UC San Diego finally brought down at four-story structure they had been testing since July on the world's largest outdoor shake table. Led by John van de Lindt, a professor of Colorado State University, they were trying to understand how to make structures with wood frames and first-floor garages better equipped to withstand earthquakes.

Results so far were positive, van de Lindt told UT San Diego:

"We learned that these buildings can deform quite a bit before they collapse; that's a positive. And the ground has to move a lot."

Saturday, Aug. 17, van de Lindt and colleagues had removed the various retrofits that they had been testing for about a month. Their goal was to see how far they would have to push the building before it collapsed. It turned out to be quite a bit.

Researchers used the Englekirk Center's shake table to simulate the 1992 Cape Mendocino earthquake, a 7.2 magnitude temblor, the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, a 6.9 shaker also known as the World Series earthquake, and finally the Superstition Hills earthquake, a 6.7 temblor that caused $3 million in damage in Imperial County in 1987. That's when the house fell down.

"The first floor just pancaked," van de Lindt told UT San Diego.

In addition to UT San Diego, the test was also covered by:

Gizmodo

10News, San Diego

CBS News 8, San Diego 

and other local TV stations. 

Learn more about the research project here. 

More info about the Englekirk Center here.

More pictures from Saturday's tests:

Gauging the Seismic Safety of Retaining Walls

Researchers at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering are testing a full-scale, 7-meter-tall retaining structure on the world's largest outdoor shake table in March and April. The tests at the Englekirk Structural Engineering Center at UC San Diego, conducted on a scale never achieved before, will collect high-quality data on the overall seismic response of the structures, which are an integral and ever-growing component of our nation's infrastructure.

The data will be used to enhance the design guidelines for mechanically stabilized earth walls in the areas where earthquakes are most likely to happen. It will also help validate previous research and existing numerical models.

The tests, led by structural engineering professors Patrick Fox and Ahmed Elgamal and Ph.D. student Andrew Sander, are sponsored by the NSF's George E. Brown, Jr. Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES).

Inside the box before it's filled.