Grant: Major Resources Support Program - Infrastructure

This proposal aims to fund academic access to the St John's Centrifuge Centre, one of the world's premier geotechnical centrifuge modelling facilities, to train highly qualified personnel and to enable seminal research on significant Canadian infrastructure problems; in particular, protecting Canadians against earthquake risk, confronting the issues surrounding climate change on buried infrastructure, addressing cold-regions issues such as frost heave on lifelines, and protecting the environment from groundwater contamination. Last year, the recommended design accelerations for seismic loading were increased by a factor of about 2 in Greater Vancouver as well as many other areas of Canada (e.g. Byrne et al., 2006). In other words, Canadian infrastructure in these regions must be designed to have much higher earthquake resistance and consider much more complicated seismic loading scenarios. In the past few years, it has also been realised that global warming will lead to significantly changed environmental conditions for Canadian infrastructure, both in the Far North as well as the more populated regions of Southern Canada. Not only is our knowledge of the science of these phenomena lacking, but there is a severe shortage of engineers with expertise in earthquake engineering or cold-regions engineering. This proposal is a timely response to the enormous demand by Canada's engineering industry for scientific advances and highly qualified personnel in these fields. This proposal represents the combined efforts of a team of 19 leading Canadian academics to use this facility to address these specific Canadian geotechnical engineering problems and to train 40 graduate student researchers. This proposal will directly benefit Canada through safer, more effective infrastructure designs, as well as strengthen this area of the Canadian knowledge economy when the majority of these experts join Canadian consulting companies upon graduation.