The main equipment and facilities required for doing research in my group are computing resources, facilities in the geotechnical laboratory and Stormwater Research Facility and the geotechnical chamber at the Advanced Structural Engineering Laboratory (ASEL). Due to the large amount of computing resources required to successfully complete the research, the load will be spread over several different facilities including the Computational Geotechnics Laboratory, Auburn University’s Hopper high performance computing (HPC) cluster, and the Alabama Supercomputer Authority. All facilities and equipment needed for my research are available at Auburn University. Features of each of these resources are described below:
Geotechnical Laboratory Facilities
The Civil and Environmental Engineering Department at Auburn University has fully equipped geotechnical laboratories that can be used for teaching, testing and experimentation. The geotechnical laboratory facilities will be used to perform supplementary laboratory tests (e.g., sieve analysis, Atterberg Limits, compaction tests, soil water characteristic curves and triaxial tests) as needed on the selected soil mixtures. A carpentry and machine shop are also available to fabricate or modify items needed for the experiments.
The Civil and Environmental Engineering Department at Auburn University has fully equipped geotechnical laboratories that can be used for teaching, testing and experimentation. The geotechnical laboratory facilities will be used to perform supplementary laboratory tests (e.g., sieve analysis, Atterberg Limits, compaction tests, soil water characteristic curves and triaxial tests) as needed on the selected soil mixtures. A carpentry and machine shop are also available to fabricate or modify items needed for the experiments.
Advanced Structural Engineering Laboratory (ASEL)
Auburn University has opened the Advanced Structural Engineering Laboratory (ASEL) in October of 2020. The 3,855-square-meter facility includes a high bay laboratory, strong floor, strong wall and a geotechnical testing chamber located within the strong floor. The geotechnical testing chamber is 7.3 m long, 3 m wide and 6 m deep. It has three 10 cm sampling ports at depth of 2.1 m that can be used to access the test chamber or route pipes or cables out of the chamber. A 10 cm diameter outlet is located at the base of chamber to drain the chamber into a sump and allow for cables and pipes to exit. A basement level allows access to the sump and sampling ports at all stages of the test. The facility also has a 30-ton crane and a clamshell bucket that can be used to fill and excavate the chamber. The ASEL is also equipped with a variety of actuators for applying both static and dynamic structural loads, a concrete testing facility, and offices and meeting space. The ASEL also has a Ganter data acquisition system capable of sampling analog and digital signals at sampling rates up to 100 kHz. This system will be expanded as part of this proposal to bring the accelerometer capacity up to 36 channels. A variety of digital still and video cameras are available for recording tests and will be used for monitoring surface displacements in the large-scale experiments. |
Computer Facilities
The college is home to several state-of-the-art networked PC and UNIX laboratories for teaching and research. These laboratories are equipped with current versions of many civil engineering software programs such as FLAC2D and 3D, PFC 2D and 3D, Abaqus, and Rocscience. Other facilities relevant to my group's work are the Computational Geotechnics Laboratory and the Hopper high performance computing (HPC) cluster managed by Auburn University. I currently have one high-performance workstations at the Computational Geotechnics Laboratory which are used for advanced numerical simulations. The Hopper cluster is a recently developed HPC facility at Auburn University available for research. The cluster has approximately 6,000 cores spread across 255 computational nodes. In addition to these on-campus facilities, free access to the Alabama Supercomputer Center facilities and software through the Alabama Supercomputer Center (ASC) and the Alabama Research and Education Network (AREN) are available to Auburn faculty for academic research. |
Stormwater Research Facility
Established in 2009, the Stormwater Research Facility at Auburn University is dedicated to producing innovative and practical solutions for stormwater management. Through interdisciplinary research, product evaluation, and hands-on training, the facility remains on the forefront of stormwater research. |