UCSD Scientists Set to Shake Things Up : Engineering: A five-story building designed to withstand The Big One will be put to the test in the equivalent of an 8.0 earthquake.

UC San Diego structural engineering professor Freider Seible and a team of experts across the nation spent five years designing a masonry building to withstand The Big One the earthquake that all Californians dread.

Last month, he built it.

And this summer, he will destroy it. Slowly.

In the first full-scale building test of its kind in the United States, Seible will unleash a simulated earthquake in a laboratory and shake the five-story edifice using 10 huge hydraulic jacks capable of exerting almost two million pounds of force--or the equivalent of an 8.0, 60-second earthquake on the San Andreas fault.

Seible, who along with UC San Diego professor M.J. Priestley developed cutting-edge retrofit technology to strengthen Caltrans bridges, believes his team may have come up with a design for constructing buildings able to survive an earthquake.

“We do not know what the strength of the next earthquake will be, so we are not necessarily designing for that capacity. But we design so the building could ride out the earthquake--whatever it is,” said Seible.

A number of experts are eagerly awaiting the results they say could one day revolutionize masonry buildings, which are common in California.

“It will be a major contribution in seismic design,” said Jim Roberts, chief of the California Department of Transportation’s division of structures.

Roberts credits Seible and Priestley with pioneering bridge retrofits last year that are designed to avert disasters like the collapse of the Nimitz freeway, which killed 42 in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake in the San Francisco Bay Area. And he believes the team may well have a similar impact on the building industry.

Many of the same principles the two structural engineers used to strengthen bridges have been applied to the building design.

Conventional buildings are designed for rigid strength. But at UCSD, the new and soon-to-be-battered 50-foot building is meant to be flexible, allowing it to bend--like the newly designed bridges--rather than break.

“We are not looking for a structure that can carry a lot of force, but a structure that can go for deformation. To make the structure perform flexibly--that’s the crux of the matter,” Seible said.

Over the years, builders have moved toward steel and reinforced concrete structures, believing they are safer during a temblor.

But Seible maintains that design of a building may be as important as materials in determining whether the building rides out a quake. Designed properly, a reinforced masonry structure could endure The Big One, he said.

With strength in mind, structural engineers traditionally designed buildings with heavy-duty vertical reinforcement. But in an earthquake, the walls tend to shift, abruptly creating large diagonal cracks. No longer able to support weight, the building collapses.

Under the new design, the reinforcement is focused along horizontal lines, with a preponderance of steel bars embedded in the walls of the bottom two stories. The doorways on each floor are constructed to flex--but not collapse--with pressure.

“We plan for where the hinges (flexibility) will occur--the strength design does not identify where the building will fail,” said Seible. “In this way, we will be able to control the collapse, namely prevent it.”

The new design that Seible will test incorporates the work of about 20 different universities and private engineering firms, all of whom collaborated on the U.S. Technical Coordinating Committee for Masonry Research (TCCMAR) during the past five years.

Each detail--from the grout in the floor to the joints in the corners, from the bond between wall panels to the flange in the walls--has been specially designed and individually tested for this building.

At the University of Texas, for example, experts labored over walls. At the University of Illinois, miniature versions of the building components were tested. And at Clemson University in South Carolina, better building materials were developed.

“This is the end point of a whole series of testing from Texas to Berkeley,” said John Kariotos, president of Kariotos & Associates in South Pasadena, who worked on the design for the five-story building at UCSD and will analyze data from the test this summer.

When Seible talks about the test, he speaks of it with the quiet glee of a host who’s been planning a party for several years.

He leans back in his chair with a wry smile, on the wall over his head are photographs of hulking structures collapsed like mashed bugs during the 1985 Mexico City and 1971 San Fernando earthquakes.

Everything in Seible’s office smacks of quakes--even the photographs of his three children, who are shown smiling while wearing hard hats. With relish, he’ll offer to show a visitor a particularly fetching photograph of a collapsed bridge in the hall.

“Just look at that,” nodded Seible, wearing white Reeboks, khaki pants and a blue-striped sport shirt. To the untrained eye, it’s difficult to see beyond the twisted tangle of concrete and steel, the wreckage of what was once a bridge.

Seible, who lives in a wood-frame house, arrived in San Diego 16 years ago from Germany, a country where earthquakes are very rare. The UCSD laboratory, where bridges and portions of buildings live and die, keeps him in San Diego.

The test of the building will occur in the Charles Lee Powell Structural Systems Laboratory, a $3-million powerhouse that shakes and breaks structures as engineers watch and measure.

When it was constructed in 1986, this laboratory and one in Japan were the only two in the world that could test full-sized buildings. Today, other such facilities have opened, but Seible’s test of a masonry building will be the first in the United States.

The test will be grueling. Seible is prepared to wield 200,000 of pounds of pressure until the building groans and nears collapse. But just as the building threatens to spill onto the 120-by-50-foot floor, Seible will stop.

“We’ve got expensive equipment here,” he said.

The five-story building, a project costing $600,000, is mostly funded by the National Science Foundation, with masonry trade groups contributing $100,000.

Seible and his colleagues will monitor the building with about 500 sensors placed within and atop the walls. Of these, 300 gauges are glued to the steel beams inside the building’s walls to measure stress and deformation. Another 200 or so are on the doorways and walls.

All the sensors are connected to a computer that can spit out 100,000 readings per second, Seible said. “Then we deal with it for the next year or so--that’s the problem when you have so much data.”

Before full-scale testing became available, experts used shake tables, or platforms that jolt up and down on hydraulic columns. But some researchers say this technique is limited because it can only test smaller models or portions of buildings--not the life-size structure.

Unlike the UCSD lab, the shake-table process also doesn’t allow researchers to halt the earthquake, measure the destruction and then continue.

“With a shake table, you push a button, and send an earthquake. Then 10 seconds later, the building collapses and you stand there and wonder what happened,” Seible said.

Seible and others maintain that the full-size testing yields reams of crucial data allowing engineers to better understand and predict the ability of a building to survive a quake.

It will also allow them to fine tune their design, which they say would cost only 2% more to build but stands a far better chance of surviving an earthquake.

“The research will result in more economic and better design for buildings in seismic zones,” said Kevin Callahan, vice president of technical services for the National Concrete Masonry Assn., a Virginia-based trade group.

Those who have worked five years on a project that’s now on the cusp of completion, hail the building’s planned demise this summer with relish.

“This is the final step,” exclaimed Kariotos. “We are going to write new standards.”