Grant: Major Resources Support Program - Infrastructure

The past year will be long remembered for the Magnitude 7.0 Port-au-Prince earthquake in January, the environmental catastrophe following the April 2010 explosion aboard the oil exploration rig Deepwater Horizon, and the devastating flooding and landslides accompanying this year's monsoon season in Asia. Each of these events dramatically testifies to the enormous social and environmental implications that result when Civil Engineering infrastructure is impacted by geohazards. However, our ability to protect against these events is limited by our knowledge of the underlying fundamental science. While much has been learned, there are many unresolved issues affecting urban and rural communities in Canada and beyond. For example, the design accelerations for seismic loading have recently been increased by a factor of about 2 in Greater Vancouver as well as many other areas of Canada (e.g. Byrne et al., 2006). But how can Civil Engineering infrastructure be best designed to minimise the risk of soil liquefaction? Following the BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, how can we ensure that Canadian offshore oil and gas infrastructure is designed to protect our fragile marine ecosystems? In particular, how can we protect against the unique additional risk of ice-bergs dragging their keels along the soil bed? How will climate change and the prospect of more intense rainfall in Canada impact the risk associated from landslides? Research aimed to manage better the risk posed by these threats to the natural and built environment cannot wait until after these scenarios occur. Instead, these facilities must be available for proactive research to generate physical data of these processes under highly controlled conditions in order to understand failure mechanisms and produce the experimental data required to validate numerical models. This proposal aims to fund academic access to Canada's only large centrifuge to enable internationally leading research on these complex geotechnical processes, and to develop and train Canadian experts with the unique skills and technical knowledge to tackle these challenging problems, and to advance Canada's outstanding geo-consulting sector.