Project Grant W911NF261A014

This two-year, $574,545 National Science Foundation project grant funds research at Dartmouth College to improve understanding of snowpack deformation and avalanche initiation. The Engineering Directorate award will support experiments and micromechanical modeling to observe the behavior of snow and ice lenses under load. Researchers will deform snow and layered snow-ice specimens in a cold room using micro computed tomography to resolve how differences in grain size, type, and density influence...

This Project Grant award, funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) under the Engineering (CFDA 47.041) program, supports fundamental research into the role of defects in the electrical actuation of elastomers (elastomer dielectrics) and explores strategies to mitigate their negative impact. The $325,555 award to Purdue University, with a period of performance from September 2023 to August 2026, aims to develop insights that could enable the adoption of low-cost polymer actuators for...

This Project Grant award of $279,710 from the National Science Foundation's Engineering program (CFDA 47.041) will develop a multiscale experimental and modeling framework to understand the coupled ice/salt crystallization phenomena in low/zero clinker cementitious materials. The research aims to elucidate the mechanisms of entrained air void formation, saturation, and crystallization damage in these materials, which is crucial for improving the durability and resilience of concrete...

This Project Grant award, provided by the National Science Foundation's Engineering program (CFDA 47.041), will fund research at Georgia Tech Research Corporation to develop predictive modeling approaches that capture the coupling between structural dynamics and the integrity of bolted joints over a structure's service life. The $631,070 award, effective from October 1, 2024 to October 31, 2028, aims to improve health monitoring of aging infrastructure, design against extreme weather impacts,...

This three-year National Science Foundation Project Grant of $543,864 supports research at Worcester Polytechnic Institute to improve mathematical modeling of material failure under applied forces. Funded through the Mathematical and Physical Sciences program, the award aims to advance variational fracture models to better predict failure in applications across civil infrastructure and national defense. Specifically, the principal investigator will enhance an existing static formulation to...

This $460,515 Civil, Mechanical, and Manufacturing Innovation Project Grant awarded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), under its Engineering program (CFDA 47.041), supports research at the University of Colorado to understand the risk of increased catastrophic landslides due to climate change. The key activities include: Conducting thermal triaxial tests and centrifuge experiments to study how changes in soil temperature affect the stability and failure mechanisms of thermally sensitive...

This $325,213 Project Grant awarded by the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Division of Polar Programs (CFDA 47.078) to The Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York will investigate the role of meltwater in governing the geophysical properties of deforming icy systems. The project aims to create new flow laws that explicitly incorporate the effects of meltwater on ice flow, which is a key factor in modeling glacial mass loss and sea level rise. The research will employ...

This $310,085 National Science Foundation project grant will fund the development of a unified numerical framework for understanding co-seismic slope failures at complex sites. Funded under the Engineering program (CFDA 47.041), the two-year award made to Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University will advance the fundamental understanding of earthquake-triggered slope failures and help predict, reduce, and mitigate their destructive consequences. The grantee will develop and validate...

This five-year $565,337 Project Grant from the National Science Foundation's Division of Civil, Mechanical, and Manufacturing Innovation, under the Engineering program (CFDA 47.041), will support fundamental research and education on electro-mechanical behaviors of soft conductive composites embedded with liquid metal fiber networks. The principal investigator will employ an integrated experimental-theoretical-computational approach to characterize network geometry evolution under extreme...

This Project Grant award from the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Engineering program (CFDA 47.041) provides $399,915 in funding to the University of California, Davis from April 1, 2025 to March 31, 2028. The goal of this research is to develop a novel scientific formulation that integrates fracture mechanics with an enriched frame element formulation, resulting in a method that can accurately simulate the initiation and propagation of fracture and fatigue in steel structures. This research...