Using a serendipitous $100,000 grant, Philip Liu, Cornell professor of civil and environmental engineering, will upgrade a wave simulator that is helping predict the effects of tsunamis on buildings and may contribute to the development of improved early warning systems.

The grant comes from California-based Spansion Inc., a major supplier of flash memory for electronic devices, which has been making major donations to tsunami relief and reconstruction efforts since the devastating Indian Ocean tsunami in 2005. Its grant to Liu is intended to help minimize damage in future disasters.

Liu did not apply for the grant. "They just called me out of the blue," he reported.

Liu, an internationally known expert on tsunamis, will use the grant to upgrade a wave tank in the basement of Hollister Hall to produce larger and more realistic waves. The tank, 120 feet long and about a yard wide, holds 3,500 gallons of water. At one end a hydraulically driven piston moves a plunger forward to generate waves up to about six inches high. At the other end, Liu places models to study how waves break over different types of coastlines and how they interact with buildings. Experiments in the tank verify the accuracy of computer-generated simulations.

To upgrade the system, Liu plans to replace the hydraulic actuator with one using electric motors, which, he said, will both triple the height of waves generated and improve the repeatability of the system. This, he said, will make it easier to scale up the experiments to represent wave heights seen in real tsunamis.

The research, Liu said, will help determine the effects of tsunamis on structures near coastlines to inform construction standards or suggest how far from the coast buildings should be built. The work will indirectly contribute to early warning systems, he added, by helping to predict how a given wave detected far out at sea might behave as it strikes different types of coastlines. The Indian Ocean tsunami, for example, was particularly devastating to Sri Lanka because its coastal plain is quite flat and allowed water to travel far inland.

Liu recently returned from a meeting in Singapore, where, he said, governments of nations bordering the Indian Ocean agreed to contribute substantial amounts of money to create a tsunami early warning system. A system is also being planned for the Pacific Ocean, with major support from the United States. What is missing, Liu said, is a warning system for the South China Sea, between China and the Philippines, where there is a high potential hazard due to known subduction zones (sites that could create large vertical earth movements) on the ocean floor.

"Let's not wait," he said.