UCSD Plans Own ‘Quake’ for 5-Story Test Building

A five-story building will be constructed at the University of California, San Diego, just to destroy it.

The Large Scale Structural Systems Lab will be capable of shaking apart a full-sized building, according to UCSD engineer Frieder Seible, the laboratory designer and its deputy director.

The building, which will never be occupied, is planned as part of a $2-million earthquake simulation laboratory expected to be finished early next year.

After the building goes up, Seible said, as many as 15 computer-controlled hydraulic actuators--100-ton jacks mounted in an unyielding reaction wall--will pull and push the structure into contortions similar to those caused by an earthquake.

1,000 Sensors to Be Used

The building’s response to the stress will be monitored by about 1,000 sensors planted throughout the structure to determine the nature and location of danger points.

Seible said the laboratory’s first project will be to build and test a bridge for the California Department of Transportation. That will be followed by the experiment with the five-story building, which is expected to take about a year to set up.

The most important data the lab will use in duplicating an earthquake’s effects likely will come from the pair of massive temblors that devastated Mexico City last week. Those temblors collapsed hundreds of buildings and trapped thousands of people in the rubble.

Mexican Sensors Placed

Geophysicists James Brune and John Anderson of UCSD’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography had anticipated that a sizable quake might hit Mexico City and had installed seismographic equipment around the Mexican capital.

“That will probably be one of the key earthquakes everybody will be (studying) in the future” because of the data gathered, Seible said.

Brune and Anderson, working with scientists of Mexico National University’s Engineering Institute, had a network of 20 instruments at strategic points to measure the violent ground motion produced by quakes centered in the Pacific Ocean about 250 miles from Mexico City.

“We anticipate that we may have recorded the best data yet on strong motion from such a large earthquake,” Brune said, adding that a scientific team is now recovering the information recorded on the instruments.

The information from the quakes, coupled with what scientists learn from the quake lab experiments, should help engineers design stronger and safer buildings, capable of withstanding major tremors.