State-of-the-Art Lab Puts Buildings to the Quake Test

Surrounded by buckled steel girders and cracked concrete columns, two powerful machines simulate the destructive forces of an earthquake.

The research taking place on the campus of the University of Nevada Reno is intended to help scientists, architects and engineers save lives by designing buildings and bridges that are more resistant to a temblor’s fury.

The just-expanded James E. Rogers and Louis Wiener Jr. Large Scale Structures Laboratory puts Nevada in the forefront of research into ways to avoid the widespread destruction of a major quake.

“Having that capability makes this place a very unique facility,” said Ian Buckle, director of the Center for Civil Engineering Earthquake Research.

“If we can simulate an earthquake in a laboratory under our conditions on our time scale, we can make progress much faster,” said Buckle, who was lured to the university last year from his post as deputy vice chancellor of research in Auckland, New Zealand.

Nevada is the third most-seismically active state in the nation, behind California and Alaska, according to James N. Brune, UNR seismology professor.

But since Nevada’s quakes are widely scattered throughout the state, he said, its residents are one-tenth as likely to experience a temblor as people concentrated in metropolitan areas such as Los Angeles or the San Francisco Bay area.

Damage caused by any earthquake depends directly on the type of soil.

In a 1989 California quake centered under a remote peak of Loma Prieta in the Santa Cruz Mountains, the areas that were built on fill were much harder hit than those on natural soil and rock. The quake registered a magnitude 7.1 and took out a span of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge 60 miles away.

The state-of-the-art laboratory in Nevada is built on a 3-foot-thick slab of concrete and adheres to the Uniform Building Code for seismic design used in Nevada and most other Western states.

Buckle, an expert in seismic engineering design, is confident that “it could survive a large quake nearby.”

Half the size of a football field, the lab uses hydraulic power to simulate the destructive ground movement of a major quake. Two 14-foot-square tables can shake 100 tons of mock-up bridge or building sections with a movement of plus or minus 12 inches, making them among the largest in the world.

One experiment is testing different types of bridge columns to find one that seems least likely to fail in an earthquake. Another seeks ways to keep girder welds from cracking under stress.

The lab is also conducting highway research for the Nevada Department of Transportation. And it has a five-year contract with the California Department of Transportation to determine how to prevent earthquake damage to bridges around San Francisco.

The 2,800-foot addition brings the lab’s size to 8,400 square feet, making it the second-largest such lab in the nation behind one at UC San Diego, which is about twice as big, Buckle said.

Another addition and a third shake table are already in the works just eight years after the original building here was completed.

UNR President Joe Crowley said the lab has elevated the school into the higher reaches of research that will make it more appealing to people such as Buckle and to students--and research dollars--that universities must attract.

The shake tables were purchased with Federal Emergency Management Agency funds, but the $1.5-million expansion to accommodate the second table was provided by a combination of state, university and private funds.

Rogers, president and chief executive officer of Sunbelt Communications Corp., which owns eight television stations in the West and a news-talk radio station in Reno, provided $750,000 to match the $400,000 from the Legislature and the $350,000 put up by UNR.

Rogers said the lab, which shares the name of his late law partner and fellow pioneer broadcaster, is “a very valuable concept not only to this state but all over the West and the world.”

On the Net: National Earthquake Information Service:

https://wwwneic.cr.usgs.gov/

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration-National Geophysical Data Center-Earthquake Data:

https://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/seg/hazard/earthqk.html

University of Nevada, Reno: https://bric.ce.unr.edu