VICKSBURG, Miss. – The U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center (ERDC) is taking care of its employees and stakeholders by perfecting the tools they use, such as the Research and Development Environment (RDE) network. Over the years, the RDE has grown into a suite of tools, services and applications that allows engineers and scientists a high-speed network for performing world-class research for the warfighter and civil works customers.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) has always used Corpsnet, which is an enterprise system that is used by most USACE districts and divisions, but that isn’t specifically designed for research and development. About twenty years ago, the RDE was developed after ERDC leadership realized the need for a network with more capabilities, and today it is under the purview of the ERDC Office of the Chief Information Officer (OCIO). Robert Walker, the deputy chief information officer, and the rest of the OCIO team are constantly asking themselves: how do we make it better?

“Every year, if we aren’t improving, then we are not keeping up with industry,” Walker said. “If we want to develop world-class products, we need world-class resources. If we want to attract world-class talent, then we have to give them world-class computational capabilities.”

During the RDE town hall earlier this year, the OCIO team showcased new offerings, which included productivity and time-management tools, cloud-hosting services and the ERDC DevSecOps platform 2.0. DevSecOps, which is short for Development, Security, and Operations, is a suite of tools that allows ERDC software developers to collaborate with cybersecurity and operations teams from the start of the project instead of waiting toward the end.

“Instead of waiting until a project is almost complete, security is able to scan the software from day one so that the developers can find potential security problems early and prepare it for operations much sooner in the process,” said Walker. “This way, when you are ready to officially deploy your product, it’s more prepared for operations from day one.”

Another significant advancement over the years has been the Cloud Computing Environment (CCE), which allows users to request server resources any day of the week or time of the day. The CCE allows users to specify server configurations and storage allocation, instead of being responsible for personal servers or network attached storage (NAS) devices under their desks. Some of the benefits to using the CCE is the baked in security, redundancy, and scalability.

Allyson Windham, the computing services lead on the OCIO team, was one of the driving forces behind getting the CCE running after a policy was released from the DOD saying that servers needed to be in an approved data center.

“Prior to the CCE, folks would purchase servers, put them under their desk, and run their workloads,” said Windham. “A large part of my time when I joined the OCIO team was finding these type of configurations and moving them to the DOD-approved CCE.”

At the RDE town hall, the team also introduced a new capability of cloud platform services on the Azure Information Level 4 (IL4) DOD servers. The capability provides a means for researchers to access the variety of tools that are needed for computational analysis at a much lower cost. The scientists and engineers are only charged for the time spent using the tool, which is much more affective from a financial standpoint.

“ERDC could never afford to purchase, install and manage every computational platform offered by commercial partners,” says Walker. “By acquiring Azure IL4 space, and bringing it directly to our ERDC researchers’ desktops, they can now access all the computational platforms that industry has to offer.”

The enhanced capabilities of the RDE have enabled ERDC to utilize digital twin technology to support the rebuilding of Tyndall Air Force Base. When Hurricane Michael came ashore in 2018 as a category 5 hurricane, it left Tyndall Air Force Base completely destroyed. A partnership was formed to repair the base, and ERDC’s Lance Marrano, a lead researcher in Installations of the Future (IotF), was placed there as a science and technology advisor to assist with navigating technological innovations during the complex reconstruction process.

After listening to the wishes of base leadership, Marrano decided that a digital twin ? a digital replica of physical assets, processes, people, and places — of the base was needed to provide decision-makers with quick and easy access to up-to-date data and analyses during the process of this massive construction project.

“That’s what digital twin technology is about, in as realistic and virtual world as possible, recreating the base, the buildings, the roads, the runways, the utilities, and saying ‘now what does that enable us to do?’” said Marrano.

Marrano worked with ERDC’s Information Technology Laboratory to establish an RDE network segment at Tyndall as a home for the Digital Twin prototype. “Without having the Defense Research and Engineering Network (DREN) connection and the RDE services, the digital twin of Tyndall Airforce Base would not have been executed,” he said.

“If we don’t have the right environment or tools to explore these new innovations, then we simply can’t,” he continued.  “It is vital that we have capabilities that allow us to experiment, prototype and improve without worrying about putting the mission at risk – it allows us to push the envelope.”  

The diligence of the OCIO team has helped position ERDC as a viable competitor against any organization for quality IT computational resources. The staff is constantly learning and training to provide core capabilities and assistance to ERDC engineers and researchers, which ultimately impacts the ERDC mission: supporting the warfighter and the nation.

“We try to keep up with industry so that we can offer our developers and researchers the best tools to help make their job easier – we are really customer focused,” said Windham. “It is challenging, but the reward is offering tools that help different domains; from the warfighter to the environmentalists.”

Claiborne Cooksey, ERDC Public Affairs

VICKSBURG, Miss. — In today’s ever-changing world, technology is advancing at lightning speed. For the U.S. Army that means constantly evolving vehicles, weapons and systems. With that in mind, the U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center, or ERDC, has partnered with the U.S. Army Program Executive Office Combat Support & Combat Service Support’s Project Manager Bridging to test high military load capacity vehicle weight limits of the Improved Ribbon Bridge, known as the IRB.

The IRB floating bridge system is used to transport weapon systems, troops and supplies over water when permanent bridges are not available. It provides wet-gap crossing capabilities either as a floating bridge or as a multi-bay raft for tracked and wheeled combat and tactical vehicles and has seen extensive combat operations with the Army and the U.S. Marine Corps since 2003.

“The family of high military load class bridging program is a program that we have here at ERDC that leverages subject matter experts across the ERDC to evaluate the structural response of the IRB when subjected to extreme loading conditions,” said Stephanie Robert, program manager and research civil engineer with the ERDC’s Geotechnical and Structures Laboratory. “We are able to look at the IRB and test it against different loading and hydrodynamic conditions to determine operational conditions in which the IRB can be deployed and subject it to increased weight and heavier vehicles.”

The multi-laboratory project reaches across the organization and includes personnel from the Mississippi Army National Guard and Anniston Army Depot. The project itself will span two years and has three testing phases: a full-scale still-water prototype test, a small-scale model test and computational modeling and analysis.

The first test phase, completed in September 2021, consisted of full-scale water testing of several military vehicles at various speeds and weights.

“We executed a fully successful test series with the IRB here at one of our testing basins,” said Dr. Wes Trim, a research mechanical engineer with ERDC Geotechnical and Structures Laboratory.

“The IRB is a complex float bridge system, and it’s difficult to test it under laboratory conditions,” he said. “We developed, designed and executed a full-scale still water test of the bridge, specifically aimed toward evaluating it against high military load capacity vehicles, by incrementally increasing our loading cases, not jumping into the heaviest most potentially damaging load first, but rather ramping up and taking a lot of measurements and inspections in between to safely approach our highest load targets.”

The team has since moved to the small-scale model testing phase of the project which will replicate the full-scale test and began in October 2021.

“We are going to take our results from our full-scale static flow testing, and we are going to validate it with our small-scale model testing,” said Robert.

“In full-scale, we had still water conditions, so there was no flow going through the channels,” she continued. “It was just the bridge out there, and we ran our vehicle across. Now we’re introducing hydrodynamic effects. We’re introducing river velocities and speeds across it that we didn’t test out in the field, so we’re able to bridge that gap.”

“We are doing scaled testing on the IRB,” said Dr. Duncan Bryant, a research hydraulic engineer with the ERDC’s Coastal and Hydraulics Laboratory. “We take a lot of care to make sure that we choose a scale where the hydrodynamic forces that we get here are captured and can be correlated up to a larger scale.”

The two tests are designed to complement each other with the small-scale test incorporating hydrodynamic aspects such as flow and depth.

“We can introduce river velocities, so we can ramp the river velocity up or down depending on what we are trying to simulate,” said Bryant. “As the water comes in, it impacts the IRB and changes the hydrodynamics. There is an operational space where it’s just too much flow for the bridge, and as you add more weight, that operational space changes. The way to do that safely is a scaled model. Here we don’t have to worry about sinking a tank or sinking a bridge, and we can try a lot of different scenarios out without any risk to anybody or any property.”

“We’re able to test conditions that we weren’t able to test in the full-scale here in a safe environment,” said Robert. “We’ll be able to determine river velocities. We’ll be able to determine max crossing speed of vehicles. We’ll be able to determine the type of crossings. We’ll be able to determine exactly how many bays we need in order to support the conditions that we are testing.”

The final phase of the project will begin when small-scale testing is complete. All data will go into a computational model to look at all loads and conditions the team was unable to test with the previous methods, which will allow the warfighter to know under what operational conditions they can safely cross the IRB.

The IRB is a robust bridge,” said Trim. “It has significant capability. It’s impressive the amount of load that it’s actually able to carry.”

By Carol Coleman