Infrastructure protectionCold-formed steel rebuilds earthquake-resistant architecture
When engineers attempt to make a building earthquake-resistant, they use specific structural components, appropriately called details, to absorb earthquake forces and help direct some of those forces back to the ground. That works, but when an earthquake hits, the entire building reacts, not just the sections containing details. Even though academic research has led to improvements to the original building codes over the decades, there is much to be learned about the entire system of a cold-formed steel building as it responds to an earthquake.
Academia and industry are collaborating in a new effort to engineer earthquake-ready buildings. The effort, based at Johns Hopkins University, aims to design and test a single structure primarily built from cold-formed steel, a material that has boomed in structural engineering projects over the last twenty-five years.
An NSF release reports that JHU engineering professor Benjamin Schafer, with funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF), helped bring together a team composed of industry professionals, professors, graduate students, and the occasional high school or undergraduate student yearning for research experience to conduct experimental and computational seismic research on cold-formed steel components.
The first industry standards and codes for cold-formed steel were written in 1946 and are mostly based on empirical data, in many cases lacking underlying theory. When engineers attempt to make a building earthquake-resistant, they use specific structural components, appropriately called details, to absorb earthquake forces and help direct some of those forces back to the ground.
That works, but when an earthquake hits, the entire building reacts, not just the sections containing details. Even though academic research has led to improvements to the original building codes over the decades, there is much to be learned about the entire system of a cold-formed steel building as it responds to an earthquake.
“When you have a big knowledge gap, you have a danger gap,” says Schafer. To fill the gap, he and his collaborators are testing and analyzing individual components of a cold-formed steel structure, and taking what they learn about each piece to design a full-scale building that will undergo three stages of shake table tests. The tests will occur in 2013 at the NSF Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES) site at the University of Buffalo in New York and are part of NEES’s broader research efforts.
