This week, host Dan Zehner talks with Ben Mason, a natural hazards researcher at Oregon State University. Mason talks about his special interests: geotechnical earthquake engineering and soil-fluid-structure interactions.
Mason says that since childhood, he was interested in how things work. But it wasn’t until his undergraduate days at Georgia Tech that he discovered his deep interest in geotechnical engineering. Professor Larry Jacobs took Mason under his wing and encouraged him to go to graduate school. Mason says he envisioned traveling to earthquake zones and helping communities at risk from earthquakes and tsunamis.
As a grad student at UC Berkeley, Mason says, he spent a good deal of time working on experiments using the centrifuge at UC Davis, the Center for Geotechnical Modeling. He was examining “soil systems,” that, during an earthquake, affect the ground performance and naturally, the structures sitting on that ground.
But how exactly does the soil affect how buildings shake? And how can the performance of a soil system be improved? Mason’s interest in soil structure interaction extended to the buildings in dense urban areas — given that in an earthquake, buildings interact with each other through the soil. He says you can see evidence of this in post-earthquake zones like Katmandu, where one poorly performing building can damage many other, stronger buildings nearby. Mason describes how he used the centrifuge to model the problem.
Now at Oregon State, near the Cascadia Subduction Zone prone to earthquakes and possibly tsunamis, Mason studies soil structure interaction – and the variable of water.
It is a complex problem, with many compounding factors, he says. You can get photos after a tsunami or earthquake, and you can get images of a building before the event. Still, he says, you can only speculate some of the causes of damage. But, he says, thanks to smartphone video recordings of tsunamis, breakthroughs are being made. Mason mentions that fellow OSU researcher Hermann Fritz pieced together flow velocities of a tsunami based on amateur video footage.
Mason discusses his current research, also taking place at the UC Davis NHERI facility, which involves modeling a tsunami in a centrifuge. The team designed a tsunami-maker for the centrifuge and rigged up a high-speed camera to track water surface and velocity during testing. The idea is to discover what happened to soil during an earthquake —and a following tsunami – and to see what it may portend for the coastal communities like those along Pacific Northwest.
Mason says he has excellent working relationships with the team at the Davis-NHERI facility, and he is pleased to be using the DesignSafe cyberinfrastructure. He says the platform is flexible and supports unique data inputs – which is important for researchers providing novel findings. And he and his graduate students like using the DesignSafe software framework.
For more information on Ben Mason and his research, read up on his faculty page at Oregon State University.
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