News

  • Soil-Foundation Structure-Interaction Experiment Captures Valuable Data Set for Research and Education

    Two experimental soil-foundation-structure-in- teraction (SFSI) structures installed side-by-side at the NEES@UCSB Garner Valley field site are fully instrumented to record their response to am- bient earthquakes. The larger frame is identified as the SFSI and the smaller one is affectionately called “MiniMe.”

    The SFSI experiments are very significant because they record in situ response of structures to earthquakes. While experimental shake table and laboratory testing research is advancing our

  • UCSB Garner Valley Site Installs Unique Cross-Hole Array Experiment

    The NEES@UCSB Garner Valley facility was recently enhanced to include a unique cross-hole array experiment. The new permanent cross-hole array includes two geophones and a solenoid-activated dual-direction hammer source at 5 meters depth. A second set of geophones at 2-m depth is deployed directly above the 5-m geophones in the same casings. The system is set to trigger once per week automatically with both upward and downward hammer strikes, thus providing the capability to measure shear-wave velocity on a weekly basis.

  • NEES Equipment Sites Reach Out to International Collaborators in ESG Research

    Using ground motions recorded from a M4.1 event at the NEES@UCSB Garner Valley field site, Amit Chourasia of the San Diego Supercomputer Center generated animations of the ground motion response in the soil column. These are the first animations produced showing site amplifica- tion that use real earthquake data recorded in the soil column. Videos and interactive animations allow users to investigate the amplification of ac- celerations, velocities, and displacements in soil layers of various stiffnesses down to a depth of 150 meters.

PG&E

 

​The UCSB Geotechnical Array monitoring program is jointly funded by the Department of Energy (award #DE-SC0020291) and a gift from Pacific Gas & Electric Co. 

This site previously funded 2015 to 2017 by the NRC Contract#NRC-HQ-60-15-C-000, project title "Observations and Analysis of Geotechnical Data". And 2004 to 2014 by the Geoge E. Brown, Jr. Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES) Program of the National Earthquake Hazards Reduction Program (NEHRP) of the National Science Foundation (NSF) under Award# CMMI-0927178. With additional funding from USGS.