Collaborative Research: Analyzing Deployable Torque-Activated Structural Mechanisms for Enhanced Tension Capacity of Geosystems

This award focuses on understanding how complex, deployable structural systems can be utilized in geotechnical infrastructures to reduce their overall size and therefore transportation, material, and life-cycle costs. Deployable underground structures are ones that change size or shape after being installed under the ground. This allows for larger foundation capacities to be achieved with less installation effort and cost.

Using deployable mechanisms to increase foundation capacity is a novel concept for geostructures since these mechanisms have only been utilized in aerospace and over-ground applications. More specifically, this research focuses on deployable underground structures with awns that increase their size underground once they are installed. The idea can be applied to foundation piles for offshore wave and wind energy converters, land-based wind turbines, and tall buildings.

Future advances from this research will enable increased sustainability of geostructures to create systems that uses less material and have better packing for transportation while maintaining the required load carrying capacity. Furthermore, in this project advanced visualization techniques such as virtual reality will be used to develop outreach tools that introduce students to concepts of structural deployment and advanced soil-structure interaction.

The specific goal of the research is to unlock this fundamental concept of underground awn deployment by gaining the fundamental physical insight required to mechanistically describe the soil-structure interactions occurring during the deployment process. The grand challenges addressed are to 1) understand soil-structure interaction of deployable, compliant structures and 2) demonstrate underground structural system deployment using an awn arrangement that enhances system foundation capacity.

Development of form-finding methods with load-transfer informed soil-structure hybrid models in combination with statistical uncertainty analysis for health diagnostics will be used to advance the knowledge base on nonlinear soil-structure interaction. This work will also advance scientific knowledge on structural analysis for deployable structures and computational modeling for soil-structure interaction.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.