Engineers Put Five-Story Building on Seismic Shake Table to Test for Earthquake, Fire Readiness
What happens when you put a fully equipped five-story building, which includes an intensive care unit, a surgery suite, piping and air conditioning, fire barriers and even a working elevator, through series of high-intensity earthquakes?
Structural engineers at the University of California, San Diego are about to find out during a two-week series of tests conducted on the world’s largest outdoor shake table at the Englekirk Structural Engineering Center. The overarching goal of the $5 million project, which is supported by a coalition of government agencies, foundations and industry partners, is to ascertain what needs to be done to make sure that high-value buildings, such as hospitals and data centers, remain operational after going through an earthquake. Researchers also will assess whether the building’s fire barriers have been affected by the shakes.
Throughout the two weeks of testing, engineers will monitor the building’s performance with more than 500 high-fidelity sensors and more than 70cameras that will record the movement of key elements and components inside the building.
“What we are doing is the equivalent of giving a building an EKG to see how it performs after an earthquake and a post-earthquake fire,” said Professor Tara Hutchinson of the Jacobs School of Engineering at UC San Diego, the project’s lead principal investigator.
Hutchinson is working with a multi-disciplinary team of academics and industry representatives, including Jacobs School Professors Jose Restrepo and Joel Conte.
The two-week series of experiments will feature a number of firsts: