Earthquake Building Design
Day One
In science, we are making a mini building with earthquake proofing techniques. We will then put these buildings on a shake table and see how they do.
Our team name is RELCO (Three first letters of team members names, plus co., indicating corporation). My team members are Lauren Lee, Evie Sumsion and me. I am the project manager, Lauren is the financial person, and Evie is the architect.
This is our whiteboard building design:
Question of the Day: Forces that Affect Building Stability
I will name a few, even though there are more.
Well, one of the forces, obviously, is whether the base is in bedrock or in soft soil. If in bedrock, the more stable the building. If the base of the building is just in soft soil, the soil will move around in an earthquake, and the building will fall over.
Second force is the metal braces. If they are good quality and strong, then the building will be strong too. If they are cheap and not-so-strong, they will probably snap during an earthquake, letting the building fall.
Third force: flexibility of the building. If the building is rigid all the way up, it will try and fight the force of the earthquake (think of this like trying to swim upstream). Instead, if should be flexible, but have a strong base (think of this like you're standing in a river. Your feet are submerged inside the soil to keep you put, but you let the rest of your body flow with the water).
Fourth force: The most important force, the earthquake and it's seismic waves itself.
There are a few different seismic waves in an earthquake. The first one is the Primary Wave that hits first. The primary waves is a wave that goes straight up, and the impact usually isn't as bad as the impact from the Secondary Wave. A Secondary Wave hits (as indicated by the name) second, right after the primary wave. It's impact is much stronger than a Primary Wave, and goes in an snake like motion across the ground, causing much more damage.
1. We brainstormed our design for our earthquake-proof building.
2. We then bought the necessary building materials and started the process of building.
3. We finished our building and tested it's stability.
In science, we are making a mini building with earthquake proofing techniques. We will then put these buildings on a shake table and see how they do.
Our team name is RELCO (Three first letters of team members names, plus co., indicating corporation). My team members are Lauren Lee, Evie Sumsion and me. I am the project manager, Lauren is the financial person, and Evie is the architect.
This is our whiteboard building design:
Question of the Day: Forces that Affect Building Stability
I will name a few, even though there are more.
Well, one of the forces, obviously, is whether the base is in bedrock or in soft soil. If in bedrock, the more stable the building. If the base of the building is just in soft soil, the soil will move around in an earthquake, and the building will fall over.
Second force is the metal braces. If they are good quality and strong, then the building will be strong too. If they are cheap and not-so-strong, they will probably snap during an earthquake, letting the building fall.
Third force: flexibility of the building. If the building is rigid all the way up, it will try and fight the force of the earthquake (think of this like trying to swim upstream). Instead, if should be flexible, but have a strong base (think of this like you're standing in a river. Your feet are submerged inside the soil to keep you put, but you let the rest of your body flow with the water).
Fourth force: The most important force, the earthquake and it's seismic waves itself.
There are a few different seismic waves in an earthquake. The first one is the Primary Wave that hits first. The primary waves is a wave that goes straight up, and the impact usually isn't as bad as the impact from the Secondary Wave. A Secondary Wave hits (as indicated by the name) second, right after the primary wave. It's impact is much stronger than a Primary Wave, and goes in an snake like motion across the ground, causing much more damage.
Day 2
1. We brainstormed our design for our earthquake-proof building.
2. We then bought the necessary building materials and started the process of building.
3. We finished our building and tested it's stability.
Our finished building design:
Our building testing is on Lauren's blog. The link is http://sb-sas45000.blogspot.sg/, and her post is called Earthquake Building Design.
Question of the Day: Building structures added to solve problems
To be honest, we had no problems during testing phases. But we did add walls right before the testing to keep the people and furniture/geoblocks inside.
Day Three
Our building testing is on Lauren's blog. The link is http://sb-sas45000.blogspot.sg/, and her post is called Earthquake Building Design.
Question of the Day: Building structures added to solve problems
To be honest, we had no problems during testing phases. But we did add walls right before the testing to keep the people and furniture/geoblocks inside.
Day Three
(Final Building Budget Sheet)
Question of the Day 1: Factors that influence engineers choices for RETROFIT
We added more tape to keep the walls in place.
Question of the Day 2: What have you learned from this engineering design activity?
I learnt a lot about money, time, and resources management. This activity also reinforced the idea in my mind that teamwork is really important. This project definitely brought us closer together as a group as (in the end) we barely made ends meet for tape to tape the walls and make an (almost) perfect building that could totally withstand an earthquake.
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