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Shaking a 275-ton Building
Roland Piquepaille writes "If you want to predict how a tall building can resist to an earthquake, some researchers have better tools than others. Engineers from the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) have built a full-size 275-ton building and really shaken it to obtain earthshaking images. The building was equipped with some 600 sensors and filmed as the shake table simulated the 1994 Northridge earthquake in Los Angeles, California. It gave so much data to the engineers to analyze that they needed a supercomputer to help them. Now they hope their study will yield to better structure performance for future buildings in case of earthquakes."
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2007-04/uoc --ei041107.php should be the article ... no images though.
Link!
Two little dashes in the url became one superdash!
A coworker of mine is in the department, and showed me this page: http://visservices.sdsc.edu/projects/nees/article. php
It has a video of the shake as well as high def video of the simulations themselves. It's pretty damn cool, you can watch the whole building flex and sway about on top of the the shake table, and the waves propagate through the building. (Each colored dot is a GPS sensor, 10 per floor, over 7 floors).
Are we at the point in history where we can design a building completely inside a computer and simulate the effect earthquakes of various degrees will have on the building?
Pretty much.
Who makes that software?
People like this: http://www.csiberkeley.com/ http://www.risatech.com/.
How much does it cost?
About $5000.