CAREER: Hurricane Surge, Wave, and Debris-induced Forces in Non-stationary Urban Shorelines

This Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) award will establish a new research direction to understand the effects of building damage induced by hurricane storm-surge on flooding and on the forces acting on remaining coastal structures in urban shorelines. Hurricanes are among the costliest natural disasters in United States history, with the three most destructive events causing nearly $500 billion in damage, underscoring the urgent need for improved understanding of how surge-induced damage affects coastal communities. The research will use large-scale experiments and computer simulations, with buildings calibrated to fail at specific loads, to model damage in realistic urban shorelines and capture its effects on flooding and the forces acting on remaining structures. The findings will inform design standards, reduce reliance on overly cautious assumptions, and support more accurate hurricane-damage simulations to improve community resilience planning. The research findings will also be translated into immersive science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education for students from middle school through college to strengthen the natural hazards engineering workforce pipeline. The education activities will include a new undergraduate course on coastal hazards and loads, research modules integrated into community college curricula, and annual workshops for middle and high school teachers to develop classroom activities on natural hazards engineering. These activities aim to address a growing shortage of engineers trained in natural hazards, which is critical challenge given the increasing frequency and intensity of coastal storm events. Large-scale experiments at the Natural Hazards Engineering Research Infrastructure Hinsdale Wave Research Laboratory at Oregon State University, using a 1:20-scale model, will be complemented by computational fluid dynamics simulations covering a wider range of urban configurations and wave conditions. The research will reveal how non-stationarity in the built environment, caused by building damage, alters overland flow and the hydrodynamic and debris-induced forces acting on buildings. New parameters will be introduced to characterize realistic coastal urban layouts and systematically quantify differences in building forces and hydrodynamics across regular and irregular non-stationary configurations. The results will also clarify whether debris damming is a critical contributor to loading during hurricane-driven surge events and how limited entrainment distances in realistic urban layouts affect debris loads. The generalization of results using Kriging-based surrogate modeling will quantify how aleatory and epistemic uncertainties influence the predictability of forces and flow, and whether they obscure underlying trends critical for design and risk assessment. 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.