Lehman, Dawn EPyke, Christopher2020-08-142020-08-142020-08-142020Pyke_washington_0250O_21747.pdfhttp://hdl.handle.net/1773/45914Thesis (Master's)--University of Washington, 2020Communities in the coastal northwest of the United States realize the threat of tsunamis. An important implementation to prevent loss of life during a tsunami is the construction of vertical evacuation shelters (VES). These shelters can be stand-alone towers or integrated into a building. For buildings, structural walls are the most common lateral force resisting system for VES structures. However, there have been few realistic tests of these systems in wave-flume facilities. This research investigates the fluid-structure interaction between a concrete core wall and an incoming tsunami wave using a large-scale wave-flume facility with an emphasis on advancements in test setup and instrumentation. The research project was phased. The first task was to determine the core wall dimensions by designing a prototype to meet the ASCE 7-16 demands; the structure was sited in Seaside, Oregon to build on prior research on tsunami demands. The design philosophy was to first design the building to remain elastic under the maximum credible earthquake demands and then design for the tsunami loading including the amplification factors required for VES structures. The resulting wall was 23 ft. by 16 ft. with a thickness of 30 inches. The second phase of the research utilized a 1:6 scale core-wall specimen. The specimen included the core wall with plan dimensions of 46 in. by 46 in. and a wall thickness of 5 in. The specimen also included a pile foundation founded on a base slab. A soil box was placed around the piles and aggregate was used to simulate an idealized boundary condition on the piles with three conditions of the soil box: full, half full or empty. The full structure (wall, slab and piles) was supported by vertical and horizontal load cells to measure axial, shear and moment reactions. The load cells were supported by a specialized reaction frame that was attached to the base of the flume. Additional instrumentation was placed to measure strains in the piles and pressure along the face of the wall. This set of instrumentation permitted redundant measurements of the forces. The forces from the different methods of measuring force on the structure were then compared against each other and showed agreement between the different techniques. The measurements were also compared to an OpenFOAM simulation. The simulated and measured results were similar, validating the numerical model.application/pdfen-USnonereinforced concrete core walltsunamivertical evacuation structureswave flumeCivil engineeringCivil engineeringThesis