ITHACA, N.Y.--In the lobby of Cornell University's Thurston Hall, floor-to-ceiling windows provide a sweeping view of the four-story crane bay of the George Winter Laboratory with its mysterious monolithic constructs of concrete and steel. This massive lab has become the home for a National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded $2.1 million project to establish the nation's premier center for large-scale earthquake simulation experiments.

The completed lab http://tpm.nees.cornell.edu/ had its public debut on Nov. 15 with an opening by President Jeffrey Lehman, followed by an NSF-sponsored live webcast of an experiment designed to study the deformation and rupturing of underground pipelines during an earthquake -- "lifelines" that can carry, for example, water, natural gas, liquid fuel or telecommunications.

The experiment was described for the Web audience by the earthquake facility's director, Harry Stewart, an associate professor in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE), and by Tim Bond, manager of technical services at Winter Lab. The co-principal investigator for the project is Thomas O'Rourke, the Thomas R. Briggs professor of CEE.

The new facility is important for Cornell, President Lehman noted, because "it reinforces Cornell's revolutionary origins as a university that is dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge, both for its own sake and also in order to respond to the pressing needs of all humanity." As part of the national NEES system, he said, the new lab will provide new information about the effect of major earth movements on pipelines "and lead to new construction practices that will enable the lifelines to survive even under the massive forces that earthquakes can generate."

Last year the NSF selected Cornell and its research partner, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y., as one of 15 national state-of-the-art-facilities that comprises the George E. Brown Jr. Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES) http://www.nsf.gov/od/lpa/events/nees/h3 >

. The network is designed to facilitate new collaborative earthquake-engineering research by linking laboratories via the high-speed Internet 2 so that they can share data in real time as experiments take place at leading engineering schools across the country. In addition, the Cornell lab has just won an additional $2.0 million NSF award to investigate ground rupture effects on underground lifelines with the new NEES facility.

The NSF webcast, which officially unveiled the NEES network, featured four of the system's labs in 10-minute-long, live demonstrations (the three other sites were the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Oregon State University and the University of California-San Diego). The Cornell lab's demonstration dramatically exposed a 30-foot section of polyethylene pipeline -- typical of that used in natural gas distribution -- to compressive forces, similar to those caused by fault movement, landslides and liquefaction during earthquakes.

This was done by burying the pipe in a huge, custom-built trough, or basin, containing 30 tons of sand. Bins lining the lab's eastern wall contain up to 100 tons of sand which is taken from guillotine hatches and transferred into the trough by a special conveyor belt system.

Powerful hydraulic pistons, called actuators, pushed the ends of the pipe segments over a distance of about six feet, allowing Stewart and Bond to apply forces of as much as 1,000 pounds for each actuator, causing the pipe to buckle upwards.

In this way, Stewart and the NEES research team were able to simulate ground rupture effects on pipelines. The actuators exerted their massive pressure by pushing against stack of 10-ton concrete blocks, acting as a "reaction wall." The blocks and wall, anchored with steel rods into bedrock at a depth of 30 feet, were designed by Keith Kesner, a former CEE post-doctoral associate who also has several years of experience as a licensed structural engineer.

Each anchor can withstand 150,000 pounds of uplift. The large block wall can withstand 600,000 pounds of uplift. The blocks comprising the wall can be detached and rearranged to allow for testing of above-ground structures such as bridge and building components.

"We'll do full-scale tests here which are time-consuming and relatively expensive to perform," said Stewart, whose interest in large-scale pipeline response to ground motions began while researching the effects of railroad traffic on pipelines buried under railroad beds.

It may take three to six months to set up an experiment that takes one minute to run," noted Bond. "People will walk by the windows up there [in the lobby of Thurston] and they won't see things change very quickly. Then all of a sudden they'll see something moving -- and then it stops and there's another apparently slow time."

Beyond its $2.1 million award, the NSF will cover operations, maintenance and personnel costs at the Cornell lab through 2014. The award also has provided for the creation of an instructional facility and electronic classroom adjacent to the Winter lab, named in honor of professor emeritus of CEE Richard N. White. As part of the new research program, the Ithaca Sciencenter will be responsible for developing a K-12 outreach program in earthquake science, and plans are being made for the construction of a 300- to 400-square-foot display at the museum that will travel across the country.

"This is not just a Cornell facility," Stewart stressed. "We are part of a national network. So we need to keep the doors open for anyone who comes in with funding and a new idea for using the unique features of this laboratory."

One of the requirements of the NEES award is that Cornell be linked to other national laboratories through Internet 2 with about one to four gigabits bandwidth. Because that type of speed previously was not available at Cornell, the university provided funds to extend fiber-optic cable into Thurston.

One important place where Cornell will be Web streaming data is RPI, which operates a geotechnical centrifuge that will complement some of the pipeline experiments at Cornell.

Stewart explained: "The faster the centrifuge is spun, the higher the gravitational field felt by objects placed in the centrifuge. So effectively, things grow when you spin them. So if you take a one-inch-diameter pipe and spin it at four G's it would act like a four-inch pipe. And if you spin it at 40 G's it will act like a 40-inch pipe. For comparison, the largest pipe we can test here is 12 to 16 inches."

"In addition to earthquake effects, the research results will be applicable to lifelines affected by adjacent construction, tunneling, unstable slopes, blasting, and subsidence caused by pumping groundwater and subsurface extraction of minerals", says O'Rourke. It is a subject he first became interested in 25 years ago while working as a research engineer working on the Metro tunnels in Washington, D.C.

Release reported and written by Cornell News Service science writer intern Thomas Oberst.

Related World Wide Web sites: The following sites provide additional information on this news release. Some might not be part of the Cornell University community, and Cornell has no control over their content or availability.

oNEES/Cornell: http://tpm.nees.cornell.edu/