CAREER: Integration of Steel Grain Bin Vulnerability and Rural Community Resilience for Multiple Hazards

This Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award will advance understanding of the performance of steel grain bins and the resilience of agriculturally based rural communities to natural hazards, particularly earthquakes and windstorms. The resilience of rural and agricultural communities typically lags behind their more urban counterparts, in part due to their unique infrastructure, and this project will take an integrated research and education approach to enhance their resilience. Findings related to the performance of steel grain bins will be translated directly to manufacturers. An integrated infrastructure and rural community resilience model will enable individual communities to evaluate their resilience accounting for their unique built environment. The education plan will contribute to diversifying and enhancing the future STEM workforce by increasing the number of rural students pursuing and persisting in engineering at the university level, where currently there exists a substantial gap between urban and rural students. A citizen science reconnaissance platform will be developed to further engage a wide range of rural citizens in the study and practice of disaster resilience. This project will contribute to the National Science Foundation (NSF) role in the National Earthquake Hazards Reduction Program (NEHRP) and the National Windstorm Impact Reduction Program (NWIRP). This overarching goal of this project is to generate a fundamental understanding of the performance of steel grain bins and the resilience of agriculturally based rural communities when subjected to earthquakes and straight-line windstorms. To reach this goal, the research plan will be comprised of two major research thrusts: steel grain bin vulnerability and community resilience impact assessments. Major research tasks for the steel grain bin will include high-fidelity numerical modeling of steel grain bins, large-scale seismic and aeroelastic testing, and development of metamodels to facilitate fragility analyses relating the hazard intensity to damage probabilities for a range of grain bins. Major tasks associated with the community resilience thrust will include the development of an agricultural community resilience model, which will be validated with respect to longitudinal structural and community reconnaissance, and the evaluation of mitigative measures to enhance resilience. This research will use the NSF-supported Natural Hazards Engineering Research Infrastructure (NHERI) Wall of Wind facility at Florida International University for aeroelastic testing and will archive and make publicly available project data in the NHERI Data Depot (https://www.DesignSafe-ci.org). This project is jointly funded by the Engineering for Civil Infrastructure (ECI) program and the Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR). 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.