California Energy Commission awards a $3 million research grant to UCLA Risk Institute on near-real-time seismic risk assessment of natural gas transmission pipelines

The California Energy Commission (CEC) has just awarded a $3 million research contract to UCLA 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 has also over $950,000 matching fund from various other sources.

The research project is a multidisciplinary research initiative coordinated by the Natural Hazards Risk and Resiliency Research Center (NHR3). NHR3 is a multidisciplinary and multi-campus research center with headquarters at the The B. John Garrick Institute for the Risk Sciences, UCLA Samueli School of Engineering.

“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 Yousef Bozorgnia, UCLA professor of civil and environmental engineering and 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,“ said Bozorgnia who is also the PI of the existing research project.

“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,” said Dr. Jennifer Donahue, UCLA Project Scientist, and the project coordinator.

Multidisciplinary 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.