The final phase of a three-year long project to increase seismic safety of buildings using light frame steel construction is under way. The research is funded by a grant from the George E Brown Jr Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation and the National Science Foundation grant. Earthquake engineering researchers from select US and Canadian universities are collaborating with steel industry design professionals to develop a series of computational models to determine how a complete building structure will perform during an earthquake, Purdue University said Thursday in a release. The initiative seeks ways to improve structural seismic design and reduce the damage of earthquakes and tsunamis.
Analysis and initial testing for the project began in late 2010 at Johns Hopkins University and the University of North Texas. The focus shifts now to the University of Buffalo, where construction of a two-storey test building was recently completed. A full-scale shake-table testing is expected to begin in the summer.
Benjamin Schafer, research team lead of the Department of Civil Engineering at Johns Hopkins University, said, “This project has already resulted in several innovations that will immediately impact seismic cold-formed steel design standards, making buildings safer. Now comes the fun part getting to see how all the research plays out on the shake table. This software will create cost efficiencies and potentially save lives.”
He said that one key deliverable from the project will be the transfer of research results into an open source software framework. The data will be made available to engineers, allowing them to see how their structural system designs will respond to an earthquake before construction.