Specializing in geotechnical engineering and coastal science, Nina Stark studies soil mechanics and soil responses to coastal and riverine stresses -- like hurricanes and related flooding. During hurricane season, you will find her in the field, collecting perishable data with NSF-supported extreme events reconnaissance teams. Today, she talks about recon missions, the importance of good datasets, and the types of data EER teams collect, including erosion, scour and sediment deposition, and water levels.

Johns Hopkins earthquake engineer and cold-formed steel researcher Ben Schafer introduces the NHERI CFS10 project underway at the NHERI UC San Diego shake table facility. Tara Hutchinson, Schafer’s co-PI on the project, is a research engineer at UC San Diego. (We will meet Hutchinson in an upcoming episode.) The CFS10 shake table experiment caps off a long-term collaboration between NSF researchers and industry. The goal: to understand seismic performance of taller cold-formed steel buildings. The structure on the shake table mimics an apartment building or hotel; it exceeds current height and system limits – which will help the team understand how far engineers can go designing for CFS structural elements, subsystems, and non-structural elements, like stairs, gas lines and sprinkler systems.

The CFS10 shake table tests are slated for early June, 2025. Follow along on the UCSD live cameras: https://nheri.ucsd.edu/live-cams

The seemingly outsized strength of cold-formed steel is not well-known. In this episode, earthquake engineer Ben Schafer, Johns Hopkins University, describes a research-industry collaboration with the automotive industry resulting in code changes for high-strength sheet-steel. Sheet steel has also been successfully tested in flooring systems. The upcoming CFS10 shake table test at UC San Diego is the high-rise building test for cold-formed steel. Schafer addresses misconceptions that structural engineers have regarding CFS: Basically: cold-formed steel looks too thin to be strong. However, with high-strength sheet steel, deformations do not correlate to lack of strength, which is something that automotive and aircraft engineers have long understood.