QuakeCoRE Seminar – 15 March 2024
February 29, 2024
QuakeCoRE Seminar – 17 May 2024
March 11, 2024
Shaking Things Up:
Aotearoa New Zealand Earthquake Engineering Resilience Put to the Test on One of the World’s Largest Shake Tables
Kiwi engineers have been working closely with their Chinese counterparts to test nine different configurations of Aotearoa New Zealand innovations on one of the largest shake tables on the planet, as part of the ROBUST (RObust BUilding SysTems) project.
The project is a true collaboration between more than eight organisations in Aotearoa New Zealand and China, including Te Hiranga Rū QuakeCoRE, Toka Tū Ake EQC, BRANZ, University of Auckland, University of Canterbury, Auckland University of Technology (AUT), HERA Foundation, and the Building Innovation Partnership. QuakeCoRE is the liaison sponsor with China’s International Laboratories for Earthquake Engineering (ILEE), also a QuakeCoRE Affiliate organisation, at Tongji University, Shanghai where the testing has been taking place over the past several months.
QuakeCoRE Associate Investigator Greg MacRae, who is the project coordinator between the Chinese and New Zealand agencies from the University of Canterbury, explains that the scope of the testing at the International Laboratory for Earthquake Engineering in Shanghai would be impossible in New Zealand, and the collaboration has provided stunning results and endorsements for New Zealand and Chinese engineering solutions.
“New Zealand is at the cutting edge of earthquake engineering, but we would never be able to test our solutions on a three-storey building in an earthquake laboratory back home,”
A number of innovative connections to reduce building damage and increase seismic resilience were tested well beyond the shaking of the Canterbury Earthquake, along with some non-structural construction elements like partition walls, sprinklers and ceilings.
Aotearoa New Zealand project partner HERA note in their recent blog post: the “nine different building configurations are tested with different friction connection types. The scale, and the range of systems used in a realistic structure, make this test program a world-first and likely the most complex full-size building to be shake table tested worldwide. It is expected that this research will lead to industry having confidence in the performance of these economical buildings, which can be used without major repair after a number of earthquakes. It also shows important characteristics of whole building system behaviour that cannot be determined from small-scale component testing or simulated in modelling”.
MacRae says the testing will wrap up in March and will give researchers and engineers a treasure trove of data to analyse over the coming months.
Toka Tū Ake EQC Head of Research Natalie Balfour says ROBUST is a great example of how funders with different vested interests can come together to enable world-leading research.
“EQC is particularly interested in how this research can lead to more earthquake-resilient buildings. Some of the technology being tested through ROBUST is already in use in buildings across Aotearoa, so it’s important to understand how they will behave in future earthquakes. These results will help design buildings to withstand large earthquakes and minimise damage.”
“As engineers and researchers, we undertake a lot of modelling and computational work to understand the way that buildings respond to earthquakes. However, the full three-dimensional interactions and inter-dependencies between different structural components can be quite complex to fully understand. Being able to test a full-scale structural system like this is really valuable to advancing our knowledge of not just this specific structure, but also to understand how our modelling strategies capture real-world behaviour to determine the response of structures more generally.”
One of the solutions tested in Shanghai was the sliding hinge connections developed by another QuakeCoRE Associate Investigator, Charles Clifton (University of Auckland), alongside former QuakeCoRE Scholar and current Associate Investigator Shahab Ramhormozian from Auckland University of Technology.
The sliding hinge connection has been welcomed and used by engineers in New Zealand and abroad, but Ramhormozian says that the rigorous testing in Shanghai is an important endorsement for the engineering world.
“We know that these new solutions work, but we can never test them to the level we have been able to in China, so for engineers and building developers it is hugely important to give them confidence that these connections will withstand very intense earthquake shaking such as we experience in New Zealand.”
MacRae says that the collaboration with China has not only validated existing engineering solutions, but has also given his colleagues a deeper knowledge on how to design, validate and improve systems.
“The work, which uses widely disseminated technology developed in New Zealand, complemented by resources and new ideas from Chinese colleagues, creates a win-win situation, which will hopefully save lives and protect infrastructure around the world.”
Watch the 1News story, below, for more on the project. Or click here to view on YouTube.
This blog post is based on a press release from Toka Tū Ake EQC. QuakeCoRE has adapted the information to provide additional perspectives on the RObust BUilding SysTem (ROBUST) shaking table testing.
