NSF Proposals Due Feb 16 to Engineering for Natural Hazards Program

The first semi-annual proposal submission window for the Engineering for Natural Hazards program is February 1 through February 16, 2016. The Engineering for Natural Hazards (ENH) program supports fundamental research to understand and mitigate the impact of natural hazards on constructed civil infrastructure.  Natural hazards considered by the ENH program include earthquakes, windstorms (such as tornadoes and hurricanes), tsunamis, and landslides.  The constructed civil infrastructure supported by the ENH program includes building systems, such as the soil-foundation-structure-envelope-nonstructural system, as well as the façade and roofing, and other structures, geostructures, and underground facilities, such as tunnels.  While a project may focus on a single natural hazard, research that considers civil infrastructure performance over its lifetime in the context of multiple hazards, that is, a multi-hazard approach, is encouraged.  Research may integrate geotechnical, structural, and architectural engineering advances with discoveries in other science and engineering fields, such as earth and atmospheric sciences, materials science, mechanics of materials, dynamical systems and control, systems engineering, decision theory, risk analysis, high performance computational modeling and simulation, and social, behavioral, and economic sciences.  Multi-disciplinary and international collaborations are encouraged.

While the ENH program supports research that utilizes the NSF-supported Natural Hazards Engineering Research Infrastructure (NHERI) cyberinfrastructure and experimental facilities, it also supports research that does not require the use of NHERI.  NHERI experimental facilities are:

  • Twelve-Fan Wall of Wind at Florida International University;
  • Large-Scale, Multi-Directional, Hybrid Simulation Testing Capabilities at Lehigh University;
  • Large Wave Flume and Directional Wave Basin at Oregon State University;
  • Geotechnical Centrifuges at the University of California, Davis;
  • Large, High-Performance Outdoor Shake Table at the University of California, San Diego;
  • Boundary Layer Wind Tunnel, Wind Load and Dynamic Flow Simulators, and Pressure Loading Actuators at the University of Florida; and
  • Large, Mobile Dynamic Shakers for Field Testing at the University of Texas at Austin.

All ENH awardees are strongly encouraged to utilize the NSF-supported NHERI cyberinfrastructure resources (http://www.designsafe-ci.org) for archiving and sharing of their research data in the NHERI Data Depot as part of their proposal’s Data Management Plan, using and contributing computational modeling and simulation tools, accessing high performance computing resources, and broadly disseminating research outcomes. The initial release of the DesignSafe cyberinfrastructure will be March 1, 2016. As you prepare your proposal, please send any questions related to the DesignSafe cyberinfrastructure, as described at https://www.designsafe-ci.org/nheri-community/cyberinfrastructure/, to info@designsafe-ci.org. 

 

The full NSF ENH announcement can found here http://www.nsf.gov/funding/pgm_summ.jsp?pims_id=505177