Soil-embedded vehicle barriers, such as W-beam guardrail systems, play a pivotal role in transportation safety, mitigating the risks associated with vehicular collisions with roadside hazards. The efficacy of these barriers greatly depends on the pile-soil system's kinetic energy dissipation capability during vehicular impacts. However, a comprehensive understanding of how soil strength, embedment depth, and impact velocity collectively govern the dynamic behavior of the pile-soil system remains a gap in current research. This study explores the dynamics of lateral impacts on piles embedded in various granular soils. The process of dynamic lateral impact and interaction between the pile and the soil was modeled using the Updated Lagrangian Finite Element Method (UL-FEM). A damage-based element erosion algorithm was incorporated into the model to accommodate severe mesh distortions and element entanglements of the soil material brought by the pile impact. Validation against well-documented large-scale physical impact tests ascertained the model's fidelity. Our findings elucidate the significant differences in resistive forces between piles in strong versus weak granular soils - notably, the former exhibited resistive forces roughly double their weaker counterparts under equivalent embedment depths and varied impact velocities. Intriguingly, a stiff pile in weak soil necessitates nearly double the embedment depth to match the energy dissipation of its strong-soil counterpart. Furthermore, the study discerned consistent depth of rotation point ranges for piles embedded in distinct soil strengths, regardless of embedment depth and impact velocity.

Earthquakes present worldwide risk to economic and human safety. The 2023 earthquakes in T & uuml;rkiye provided a reminder of the potential for catastrophic consequences with 50,700 deaths and 15.7 million people affected. The ability to predict ground motions and infrastructure damage for earthquakes continues to be a challenging problem for scientists and engineers. Until now, estimates of ground motions have been performed empirically by looking at sparse data from past earthquakes. This approach can provide statistical information on intensity amplitudes but cannot inform site-specific ground motions essential to developing the most effective resilience. Interest has grown in large-scale computational models to simulate earthquakes at regional scale. The U.S. Department of Energy EarthQuake SIMulation (EQSIM) framework was developed for regional-scale earthquake simulations at unprecedented fidelity, taking advantage of emerging GPU-accelerated systems. This article describes the EQSIM workflow and demonstrates regional-scale simulations with the new computational capability available to scientists in their quest to mitigate future disasters.

Soil directional emissivity plays a crucial role in canopy thermal-infrared (TIR) emissivity modeling over sparsely vegetated solo slopes. To our knowledge, the canopy emissivity model explicitly considers soil emissivity directionality, and topography does not exist. This study proposes a new canopy emissivity model under the framework of the four-stream approximation theory employed in the well-known 4SAIL model by incorporating soil directional emissivity and topography. The new model was validated by the discrete anisotropic radiative transfer (DART) model. The new model-simulated canopy emissivity data exhibited excellent consistency with the DART simulation data, and the bias, root mean square error (RMSE), and determination coefficient ( R-2 ) were -0.001, 0.003, and 0.97, respectively, under the different leaf area indices (LAIs), slopes, and view zenith angles (VZAs). Sensitivity analysis revealed that LAI and soil nadir emissivity explained most of the variance, with total sensitivity indices of 52.9% and 30.3%, respectively. The effects of soil directional emissivity, topography, and leaf angle distribution (LAD) on canopy emissivity were subsequently investigated, and the results indicated that the differences could reach more than 0.02 when soil directional emissivity and/or topography were neglected; moreover, the influence of LAD functions is not significant. The model proposed in this article provides a practical method for modeling mountainous area canopy emissivity and can improve estimates of surface broadband emissivity (BBE) and land surface temperature (LST).