RESILIENCE10-story Steel-Framed Building to be Put to the Test on UC San Diego Earthquake Simulator
A10-story cold-formed steel-framed building will soon be put to the test on an earthquake simulator at the University of California San Diego to see how well it can withstand earthquakes.
A10-story cold-formed steel-framed building will soon be put to the test on an earthquake simulator at the University of California San Diego to see how well it can withstand earthquakes.
The UC San Diego shake table is the only outdoor facility of its kind in the world, and the only simulator capable of testing a building of this height.
Current building codes in the United States only allow for six-story buildings when cold-formed steel is the chosen structural system. The results of this test will help determine if that height limit can safely be increased. Researchers are planning to run the tests in June 2025.
The building is already constructed and is sitting on UC San Diego’s outdoor shake table. Researchers will turn the shake table on and recreate earthquake motions recorded during prior earthquakes, including recordings from the magnitude 6.7 Northridge earthquake which struck Los Angeles in 1994 and the magnitude 6.9 Loma Prieta earthquake which struck Northern California in 1989.
This outdoor earthquake simulator at UC San Diego can shake structures weighing up to 2,000 metric tons, or 4.5 million pounds—roughly the weight of 1,300 sedan-sized cars. This makes the earthquake simulator capable of carrying the heaviest test structures in the world. The shake table can also accelerate to at least 1g–the amount of gravity we experience on Earth when we fall. These motions can in turn accelerate the top of a 10-story building to as much as 3g. For reference, on average, riders on modern roller coasters experience 4g of peak acceleration. Because the shake table is outdoors, it is able to evaluate tall buildings that could not be tested elsewhere.
“We are able to test new ideas and push the boundaries of what we’re doing in structural design and construction,” said Tara Hutchinson, a professor in the UC San Diego Department of Structural Engineering and one of the project’s principal investigators. “Cold-formed steel is a great example of a promising light-weight, sustainable, and highly durable material, ideal for use in regions of high seismic hazard and for construction of tall buildings.”
The shake table is funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation, which is also
