Engineers will severely stress a 10-storey tower on the UCSD quake table to test the mettle of tall wood buildings. The shaking will be equivalent to the magnitude 6.7 Northridge earthquake and could answer serious questions about the durability of ‘tall timber’. Source: San Diego Union-Tribune
Engineers at UC San Diego’s outdoor earthquake simulator in Scripps Ranch are about to finish building a 10-storey wooden tower that will undergo fierce shaking to explore how well tall timber structures can handle quakes and other natural disasters.
This is the tallest building ever placed on the shake table, which just underwent a US$16.3 million upgrade that will enable researchers from around the world to more realistically simulate temblors.
The new project is being led by the Colorado School of Mines, which will subject the tower to shaking that will be equivalent to the magnitude 6.7 Northridge earthquake, which struck the San Fernando Valley in 1994, killing 60 people.
The testing will begin in February.
The tower is mostly composed of cross-laminated timber along with steel, making it different from traditional tall buildings, which are mostly steel and concrete.
“We’re trying to see if we can construct mass timber buildings that would be resilient in high seismic zones,” said Shiling Pei, a mining school engineer and the project’s co-director.
In this case, resiliency refers to a building’s ability to survive strong shaking without suffering structural damage.
As engineers note, wood has been used in building construction for thousands of years. But they say advances in design are making it possible to efficiently build strong, safe structures eight stories or higher that are primarily composed of wood. The concept is being hotly pursued, in part, because wood is a sustainable material.
