A star-studded audience that included a U.S. congressman, the University of Arkansas System president and the chancellor of its Fayetteville flagship campus saw the beauty and brawn of the Grady E. Harvell Civil Engineering & Research Education Center (CEREC) on Oct. 22.
The group attended a stress test at the CEREC facility in Fayetteville on a steel beam, an experiment designed to mimic an earthquake’s effects. Principal investigator Gary Prinz and co-principal investigator Morgan Broberg, both UA professors, oversaw the experiment, in which 180,000 pounds of pressure were applied to a rooftop connector joint.
Prinz, an expert in earthquake-resistant construction, said the test was the first of its kind on a rooftop connector beam and was enabled by the 37,400-SF CEREC. The test was sponsored by the American Institute of Steel Construction.
“This place is fairly unique. It’s unique for the state of Arkansas, and I think it’s a great resource where we can be a part of advancing things,” Prinz said. “There are several large-scale structural testing facilities nationwide, [but] of this scale and of this quality, there are fewer. “We’ve tried to gear ourselves to have fairly unique capabilities here in Arkansas, so we can be competitive for doing national-level research and then to train our students to be at that top level.”
The actual experiment was slow moving as a hydraulic press repeatedly put pressure on the steel beam before releasing the pressure to simulate an earthquake. Early in the experiment, the beam officially qualified, which Prinz announced to the gathered crowd. But engineers being engineers, the experiment was continued until the steel beam buckled and finally popped under the pressure, with a cracking sound Prinz compared to a gunshot going off.
“It’s literally you’re just cooking that piece of steel back and forth, and it just eventually failed,” Prinz said. “But we took it well beyond what would be expected during an earthquake. The earthquake’s requalification was much earlier in the test, back when I yelled, ‘Hey, it’s qualified.’ “That’s the type of damage you would expect in a serious design-level earthquake. We’re researchers, so we take things to the limit to see how they perform and why they perform the way they do, to help calibrate our models.”
Grady Approved
One of the most interested onlookers at the earthquake test was the namesake of CEREC, Grady Harvell.
Harvell, the president and COO of W&W/AFCO Steel Inc. of Oklahoma City, was a major driver behind the construction of CEREC after it was conceived in 2012. The $15.5 million facility opened in 2021 with construction funding from the University of Arkansas and private donors like Harvell, who earned a structural engineering degree from Arkansas in 1971.
“I never envisioned my name would be on a building up here when I left here in December of 1971,” Harvell said during a pre-demonstration luncheon. “I’m so proud we are able to do this with the students and the state.”
Harvell had a sales pitch for the crowd before the earthquake test: He’s seeking funds for CEREC’s Phase 2, which is a $16.6 million project to expand CEREC’s offerings in geotechnical services, transportation and asphalt research.
“I don’t want to see us go another 13 years before we finish a job that is half done,” Harvell said. “I don’t want my name on a project that is half done. We need to do Phase 2.
“Phase 2 will only cost us about $15 million if we hurry and do it. I am here today to plead … to get Phase 2 built some time before I die.”
CEREC’s supporters point out the $21 million in research projects the facility has attracted since its opening. Harvell mentioned an example when he said he noticed how many shear studs were used to anchor beams to concrete in bridge construction. He said he had a “gut feeling” that fewer stakes could be just as effective.
“Can’t change code based on my gut feeling,” Harvell said. “It takes research. We challenged Dr. Prinz to do this research.”
Harvell said the four-year research project showed fewer shear studs could be used, which could conceivably result in millions of dollars in construction savings.
Not Just Research
Prinz said that the work that UA faculty and students do at CEREC has an impact nationwide. U.S. Rep. Steve Womack, R-Ark., stayed for the earthquake test, chatting with Harvell and others. At one point, as the steel beam being tested started to flake and crimp, Womack filmed it with his phone.
“That is not surprising that some amazing things that happen at the university have a ripple effect throughout the entire state of Arkansas and the national economy,” Womack said. “When you consider the work that’s been done at a place like CEREC and when you consider the impact of the entrepreneurial spirit that basically is what this area is known for, just amazing things happen.
“We love to showcase it to the rest of the country. This does not surprise me that we are on the cutting edge of this kind of research [that] is going to have an impact on the quality of life and the safety and security of a lot of the infrastructure.”
Charles Robinson, the chancellor at UA Fayetteville, said facilities such as CEREC not only provide quality research but also help produce quality graduates.
“It’s one of the bedrocks of our research enterprise, and it helps us to be a better land grant [university] serving the state and the nation,” Robinson said. “I think people sometimes don’t understand outreach. They don’t understand the high quality of our education, because we’re educating the next generation of engineers. So it’s not just about doing research, it’s also about educating young people. We are developing the workforce of the future.”
Center of Attention
CEREC is a major recruiting tool for the university’s engineering department. Broberg, who earned a doctorate in engineering from Purdue University, joined the UA as an assistant professor in August 2024. Without CEREC, she would have gone somewhere else.
“Without facilities like this, frankly, you probably don’t recruit me, 100% honesty,” Broberg said. “One, it brings in top researchers. Both professors and then the graduate students, they’re able to have hands-on experience in the lab and do experiments and directly affect how we build buildings, bridges, etc., in the U.S.
“Without this type of facility, we’re limited to doing smaller-scale experiments that we need to rely on someone else’s data. Without this facility, there isn’t this experiment. There isn’t this test setup, so CEREC contributes to continual improvement.”
Broberg said the physical experiment allows better computer modeling. Before a test like the earthquake one, she and other researchers model when the damage and break will occur, then compare the actual test to the computer prediction.
“We saw physical testing, we hit that limit, so that’s perfect,” Broberg said. “We can take this one test and expand it into a lot more cases in the computer, because we can do what’s called benchmarking. Physical testing increases my confidence in computer modeling.
“Until I have a physical test, a computer answer is just like a guesstimate.”
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