How To Build An Earthquake Proof House?
1. Establish a Flexible Foundation – One option to withstand ground forces is to “raise” the building’s foundation above the ground using a technique known as base isolation. The process of isolating a base entails erecting a structure on top of steel, rubber, and lead-based flexible pads.
How can a structure be made earthquake-resistant?
Installation of dampening devices is one method for making a structure earthquake-resistant. Today, these techniques are increasingly employed to construct earthquake-resistant structures.
How do earthquake-resistant structures protect us from tremors?
Many of the world’s most populated cities are situated in earthquake-prone zones, despite the fact that quakes can result in loss of life and severe property damage. Engineers have created a variety of earthquake-resistant building systems in order to save lives and decrease property loss.
Putting a building’s foundation on bearings that allow the entire structure to move is one way (technically called a base isolation system ). There are several types of earthquake-resistant bearings (see Additional Background for specifics), but they all have the following characteristics: They insulate the structure’s foundation from the earth’s movement, allowing the building and ground to move independently.
After an earthquake, they have a restoring force (like a spring) that restores the structure to its original position. They have dampening (friction) that helps absorb earthquake energy and prevents the structure from vibrating for an extended period of time.
Bearings provide a function very similar to that of a vehicle’s shock absorbers. When driving over large speed bumps or potholes, the shock absorbers prevent vibrations from being transmitted to the passengers. Similarly, bearings prevent unexpected ground movements from transmitting to the structure itself.
Engineers evaluate the earthquake-resistance of their designs using shake tables, which replicate the impacts of earthquakes on scale models. Figure 1 depicts two structures on a shaking table. The structure on the left is directly tied to the ground, but the structure on the right has a base isolation system.
Observe how the left building sways dramatically when the table shakes. However, the structure on the right remains standing and looks to remain mainly in place while the table travels back and forth underneath it. In this lesson, your students will design and construct their own base isolation systems for standardized buildings (such as cardboard boxes of similar size) and a basic hand-powered shaking table (using a ruler and stopwatch to standardize how much and how fast they shake).
A destructive test is one approach to evaluate the efficiency of a base isolation system (or any other sort of earthquake-resistant alteration) – continue shaking the table until the structure falls. For non-destructive testing, you can monitor the building’s movement with an accelerometer, which measures acceleration in meters per second squared (m/s2).
- This will be accomplished by your pupils utilizing their mobile phones and a sensor app, which allows you to capture data using the accelerometer within the phone.
- A building with an effective base separation system will have far smaller acceleration peaks than one with direct ground attachment (Figure 2, left) (Figure 2, right).
Students will follow the engineering design process in this assignment. Engineering design is an iterative procedure in which students design, construct, and test their containers. Students must comprehend that there is no single “correct answer” to an engineering assignment.
Determine the earthquake susceptibility of your home – The first step in earthquake-proofing your property is to conduct research on its location and history. Your home’s susceptibility to earthquakes is influenced by closeness to fault lines, ground soil, neighboring natural features such as hills and seas, building age, and building condition.