The John A. Blume Distinguished Lecture

Structural Dynamics Applications and Research at Los Alamos National Laboratory

Charles R. Farrar
National Security Education Center
Los Alamos National Laboratory

Wednesday, February 19, 2025
4:30pm, Reception Following
Paul Brest Hall
Stanford University

Many peoples’ perception of Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) is tied to activities associated with the Manhattan Project that occurred from 1943 to 1945. Those perceptions have been reinforced by the recent movie Oppenheimer. Although led by scientists, that project was a large-scale, multidisciplinary engineering effort. Today, approximately half of LANL’s technical workforce are engineers. This talk will provide an overview of one capability associated with that engineering enterprise – structural dynamics. To begin, a brief introduction to LANL, its current mission and its engineering enterprise will be provided. Then, to demonstrate ties to John A. Blume’s legacy, various experimental and analytical earthquake engineering studies will be presented including the margins -to-failure assessments of nuclear power plant reinforced concrete structures, seismic buckling studies of reactor containment structures, paleo-seismic hazard studies of the Los Alamos site and probabilistic risk assessments of LANL’s current nuclear facilities. Next, some of LANL’s unique structural dynamics test facilities and instrumentation will be presented including a blast tube, centrifuge, high-explosive radio-telemetry system and the dual-axis radiographic hydrodynamic test facility. Current research efforts related video-based structural dynamics measurements, structural health monitoring applied to scientific infrastructure, muon tomography (imaging the Fukushima reactor core) and planetary defense (deflecting or fragmenting asteroids) will be summarized. This talk will conclude with a summary of various education programs that LANL hosts including a structural dynamics summer school. Each topic discussed will be presented as an overview suitable for students and engineers at all levels including those who do not work directly in structural dynamics.

Bio

Charles Farrar obtained a Ph.D. in civil engineering from the University of New Mexico in 1988. He has been employed at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) since 1983 where he recently stepped down from his positions as the leader of LANL’s Engineering Institute (for the past 20 years, a research and education collaboration between LANL and the Univ of California San Diego’s (UCSD) Jacobs School of Engineering), and the coordinator for LANL’s Engineering Leadership Council (past 3 years). The first ten years of his career focused on performing experimental and analytical structural dynamics studies for a wide variety of systems including nuclear power plant structures subjected to seismic loading, and weapons components subjected to various portions of their stockpile-to-target loading environments. Since 1992 his research interests focus on developing integrated hardware and software solutions to structural health monitoring (SHM) problems. The results of this research have been documented in 400+ coauthored journal publications, conference proceedings, reports and a book entitled Structural Health Monitoring A Machine Learning Perspective. Additional professional activities include an adjunct faculty appointment in the structural engineering department at UCSD where he teaches a course entitle “Structural Health Monitoring Principles,” and the development of a structural health monitoring short course that has been offered more than 45 times to industry and government agencies in Asia, Australia, Europe, South America and the U.S. He is the founder of the Los Alamos Dynamics Summer School and he is a co-developer of the Los Alamos Judicial Science School. He is a Los Alamos National Laboratory Fellow and a Fellow in the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, American Society of Civil Engineers and the Society for Experimental Mechanics.