Earthquake Testing on Cold-Formed-Steel Buildings

Using massive moving platforms and an array of sensors and cameras, Johns Hopkins structural engineers are trying to find out how well a two-story building made of cold-formed steel can stand up to a lab-generated Southern California quake. The testing is taking place at the University at Buffalo's earthquake engineering research center. The results are expected to lead to improved nationwide building codes that will make future cold-formed steel buildings less expensive to construct than current ones. In earthquake-prone regions, these code updates should help structural designers and builders reduce the likelihood of a costly and life-threatening building collapse.

Transcript

00:00:01 [Music] the area of steel i specialize in is called cold form steel uh it's just sort of a technical name it's a it's a type of thin sheet steel that's literally cold bent so they actually just physically bend it into shape and while it may not look like much it's turned out to have a huge impact on buildings in the last 50 years so we want to

00:00:35 understand cold form still buildings of course we can only test one building so we got together with a group of experts and design engineers and actually professionally designed and archetype building so the one that had all the features that we felt were of most interest for studying the entire building system it's about a 50 foot by 20 foot by 20 foot tall or two-story

00:00:54 tall building it's virtually sighted in los angeles and then we've actually physically constructed the building at the laboratory in buffalo if you're interested in earthquakes and you want to do a test on a building then you need to replay an earthquake on a building there's only a few places in the world or in the nation you can do that our project received from the national

00:01:15 science foundation funding to use a laboratory in the university at buffalo they have a facility that allows us to take a table which is hooked up to hydraulics it's it's a same size almost as our building so about 50 foot by 20 foot and we can put the entire building on their table and then we can replay in 3d the motion of any earthquake we're

00:01:35 interested in so we're really looking at a building that can provide the same performance we have today or better but do it with less resources i mean that's what we're all asked to do every day do your job with less resources that's what we're asking the buildings to do do the same job we've always asked you to do but you got to have half the material you used to have and that's what we're

00:01:50 trying to figure out [Music] you