Professor conducts seismic research

While a construction team works outside Science Building 2 to renovate the building to prevent it from being seriously damaged in an earthquake, civil engineering professor Peter Dusicka and his team are in its basement conducting seismic experiments.

Dusicka’s team simulates earthquakes with a shake table in the infrastructure Testing and Applied Research [iSTAR] lab to test how an insulator will protect transformers. 

The preliminary test results are good, Dusicka said. “Now it’s just a matter of looking at the data to see exactly how positive the results are.”

 The project, sponsored by Bonneville Power Administration, is looking at how different electrical structural components will respond in the event of an earthquake.

“We’re using a concept that is typically used on large structures and adopting it for this particular case,” Dusicka said. “The research on our end is, can we adopt this technology that is used somewhere else in this particular application in order to achieve our goal?”

Dusicka has been a professor at Portland State since 2004 and has been studying earthquake issues for approximately 12 years. His Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Nevada included work on the new Bay Bridge project in California.

“The new Bay Bridge is a fairly unique bridge,” he said. “Part of my dissertation dealt with a critical component of that bridge that is supposed to absorb energy and protect the rest of the structure by attracting the seismic energy.”

By focusing seismic energy on specific components of a structure, damage to the overall structure can be minimized, according to Dusicka.

“The idea is these components are essentially replaceable and are engineered and made out of materials that we know will perform to what is required,” he said.

Robert Dryden, who was the dean of the Maseeh College of Engineering when Dusicka was hired in 2004, said, “[Dusicka] is a very innovative, creative person. He built and expanded the [iSTAR] lab into a greater area of interest than it had been.”

Dusicka’s research projects also span the entire state of Oregon and have the possibility of impacting everyone who lives or drives in the state.

Currently, he is tackling a project involving the Oregon Department of Transportation and the Oregon Transportation Research and Education Consortium, which examines the transportation systems for the entire state.

“Typically when you do these types of evaluations they’re quite localized,” Dusicka said. “We’re trying to do it on a statewide basis and we’re trying to see the vulnerability of the transportation network, primarily the bridges on that transportation network, all due to seismic [activity].”

The project is important because many of Oregon’s bridges were built in the 1970s, according to Dusicka.

“Typical bridge design life at that time was about 50 years, and at that time we didn’t really understand what the earthquake risk is in Oregon,” he said.

Forty years later, engineers now know what kind of seismicity to expect in Oregon.

“We know that since we have this inventory of older structures that were designed without this knowledge, we know that they’re vulnerable,” Dusicka said. “The reason we’re doing a statewide basis is when we get a subduction zone earthquake—and it’s not ‘if,’ it’s ‘when’—a lot of the state will be affected. The earthquake will be fairly large in geographical area so we need to consider the entire state.”

Commenting on Dusicka’s work, Dryden said “I expect that he will be nationally known for his procedures to minimize the time to get things back up and running after a catastrophic failure.”

Catastrophic failures can prevent hospitals from operating and emergency personnel from helping the injured, as well as require costly repairs. With new materials and designs, engineers can prevent the total destruction of a building by dictating where the damage from an earthquake will be concentrated.
“His research in Structural Engineering is timely to the region and the nation as we try to build more sustainable structures and structures that withstand earthquake loading,” said Scott A. Wells, Chair of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering.

Another research project Dusicka heads is applying the concept of focusing seismic energy to a specific, designed component of a structure to buildings. His work has netted research sponsored by the National Science Foundation and the American Institute for Steel Construction.

 “There’s an obvious need for modern society to have infrastructure that can ride these events out,” he said. “We know they’re coming. We don’t know how big they are, but maybe we can engineer for when they do come.”