UCLA civil and environmental engineering professor and Natural Hazards Risk and Resiliency Research Center (NHR3) director Yousef Bozorgnia heads a research project that was just awarded a $3 million contract by the California Energy Commission (CEC). The multidisciplinary and multi-institution team is poised to study the near-real-time seismic risk assessment of major natural gas transmission pipelines. The three-year research project will examine multiple sensor technologies and combine them with extensive simulations to develop a platform to assess seismic risk in near-real-time. The project also has over $950,000 in matching funds from various other sources.
NHR3 is a multidisciplinary and multi-campus research center with headquarters at the B. John Garrick Institute for the Risk Sciences at the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science.
“Real-time assessment of safety and reliability of major natural gas transmission infrastructure is important for the communities on how to respond after a major seismic event,” said Bozorgnia, the project’s Principal Investigator (PI), “This is a follow-up of an existing $3.5M research project on seismic risk analysis of natural gas infrastructure.“
“The challenging goals of this project require a diverse range of expertise, and we’ve assembled a very strong team from both academia and practitioners,” said Ali Mosleh, director of the Garrick Risk Institute and UCLA’s Evalyn Knight Professor in Engineering. “Successful coordination of large projects like this one is essential to finish the project as planned,” added Dr. Jennifer Donahue, UCLA Project Scientist, and the project coordinator.
The institutions involved in the project include UCLA (the lead agency), University of California at Irvine, Caltech, University of Nevada at Reno, DNV GL, and Paulsson, Inc.