Quake experiments may lead to sturdier buildings

business owners who are economically tied to such structures. If a critical warehouse or a major customer service center can continue to operate after an earthquake, the business owners will likely incur lower losses.

“For this reason, a sturdier building can lead to lower insurance rates and provide a level of business confidence for certain owners,” Schafer said.

How can a business owner or insurance company predict how well a cold-formed steel building will stand up to an earthquake? Current estimates rely on a technique that tests how quake-like forces affect a single portion of a wall. Schafer’s study, in contrast, will treat the structure as a full system that includes complete walls, floors, roofs, interior walls and exterior finishes, all of which can contribute to how well the building stays intact when severe shaking occurs.

To compile this data, Schafer and his colleagues will test building components in a structural engineering lab at Johns Hopkins. They will also develop computer models aimed at predicting how well these building components and structural designs will resist earthquake forces. In the third year of the study, the researchers will conduct full-scale building experiments at the Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation equipment site at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York. This site has full-size shake tables that will allow the researchers to mimic the effect of an earthquake on various configurations of multi-story cold-formed steel framed buildings.

“We will attempt to ‘fail’ the buildings,” Schafer said, meaning that the level of shaking will increase until the buildings collapse. The goal will be to find structural designs that hold up at the level of the most severe modern-day earthquakes.

“The ultimate purpose of this project,” he said, “is to give structural engineers better tools to make predictions about what will happen to cold-formed steel buildings in an earthquake. That will give them more flexibility to design the whole building and will give them the validation to know that it will stand up to a certain magnitude of earthquake forces.”

Schafer’s collaborators in the study include Narutoshi Nakata, an assistant professor of civil engineering at Johns Hopkins; a Bucknell University team led by Stephen G. Buonopane, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering who earned his civil engineering doctorate at Johns Hopkins; researchers from McGill University in Canada; and professional engineers from Devco Engineering, based in Oregon. Additional funding and support will be provided by the American Iron and Steel Institute and by Bentley Systems, a developer of engineering software.

As part of an outreach effort, students from Johns Hopkins, Bucknell University and Baltimore Polytechnic Institute also will take part in the research project.