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Buildings & Construction

Structural engineering

News and Updates

Projects and Programs

Building-Level Seismic Performance Assessment

Ongoing
Objective: To better understand the seismic performance of buildings designed in areas of medium-to-high seismicity and to identify ways to create enhanced performance through low-damage approaches, improved code provisions, and improved analysis procedures. What is the Problem? Despite progress

Implementation of Joplin Tornado Recommendations

Ongoing
Objective - To implement all 16 recommendations from the NIST Joplin tornado investigation, at the earliest possible date based on code and standard development cycles, by: (1) conducting research and development to provide the technical foundation for improved guidelines, standards, codes and (2)
Running crack in a buried pipeline.

Pipeline Safety

Ongoing
The U.S. operates more than 2.5M miles of natural gas, petroleum and hazardous liquid pipelines, crossing all 50 states and operated by more than 3,000 companies. Fluid hydrocarbon fossil fuels remain the world leading source of energy. The safest and most reliable means of transporting these fuels

Collapse Assessment of Buildings under Seismic Loading

Completed
Objective - To evaluate the collapse probabilities of a suite of steel buildings for a series of increasingly severe earthquake ground motions, and to compare these probabilities to the collapse objective presumed in ASCE/SEI 7. The probabilities of collapse will be determined using the methodology

Publications