A research team led by Professor Kenichi Soga was recently granted $3 million by the California Energy Commission to enhance the seismic risk assessment of natural gas storage and pipeline infrastructure. Over three years, the team will use remote and embedded sensing technology and advanced data management and analysis techniques to monitor gas infrastructure continuously.
These methods will be integrated into OpenSRA, an open-source software tool for monitoring and risk assessment, enabling predictive modeling and data analytics even in uncertain conditions. Researchers and experts from UC Berkeley Engineering, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Slate Geotechnical Consultants, and the NHERI Computational Modeling and Simulation Center (SimCenter) will conduct the work. Southern California Gas Company and Pacific Gas and Electric Company are cooperating utilities. The Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research Center (PEER) will provide support to this project.
Source: UC Berkeley CEE.