Elinya

 There are numerous ways to make a building or structure more stable. For example, some people think all house frames in earthquake-prone areas should be made of bamboo, because it’s flexible. Radio towers sometimes have really strong cables that anchor them to the ground while the base is built on a huge hemisphere that allows the whole tower to pivot in the wind. Some buildings have weights that hang in the middle so that when the building starts to tilt, the weights help to pull it back upright. There are many more methods than that so I’ll probably just experiment with a few of the most common. I’ll build some simple ‘to scale’ building models, incorporating these methods and put them on a small handmade shake table to see which one works best. It won’t be super accurate, but it should be interesting. Earthquakes and other natural disasters have a big impact worldwide. Volcanoes erupting block flight paths; tsunamis decimate cities; tornadoes sweep everything up and spit it out, totally destroyed; and of course, earthquakes cause everything to collapse. The amount of damage caused by an earthquake varies, depending on how close the movement is to the surface of the earth. A large earthquake in a fairly populated area equals complete devastation, and falling buildings are the main problem. The rubble buries everything, because regardless of how well the building has been stabilised, nature is usually stronger.
 * What is the best way to stabilise a building in an earthquake?**
 * Outline **
 * Research Paper **

Hopefully, however, this doesn’t mean it is impossible to keep a building upright in an earthquake. In this experiment, I will see if there is a way to keep a (model) building upright in unstable conditions.

Earthquakes are caused by the movement of tectonic plates. Approximately every eleven seconds, somewhere in the world, an earthquake occurs, but most of the time we do not feel anything. Earthquakes rating 1 – 2 on the Richter scale are known as ‘microquakes’, and unless they are really close to the surface of the earth, they make no impact at all. Microquakes can only be picked up by seismographs.
 * Earthquakes **

A basic seismograph can be one reasonably heavy weight which hangs from the ceiling of a building, with a pen attached to the bottom of it. If you set up a long roll of paper to be slowly moved along a table underneath, you have a simple seismograph (albeit a fairly dodgy one). It has to be a heavy weight so that when, for example, a truck drives past the building, it does not pick up all the little tremors. Some high-tech seismographs can even work out where the epicentre of the earthquake is.

Earthquakes are obviously more common in countries that lie over the edge of two of the earth’s tectonic plates. The continents are organised over the plates, so usually there are not that many earthquakes in the middle of continents. For example, New Zealand is directly along the edge of the Indo-Australian plate and the Pacific plate, and they have a lot of earthquakes there.

It seems to me that one of the most important methods of stabilising a building in an earthquake all come under ‘base isolation’. This really just means a way to make the base of the building able to move around on the ground a bit, as that absorbs a lot of energy.
 * Buildings **

There are actually heaps of ways that buildings can be stabilised in earthquake-prone areas. They include anything from crossing support beams to a slightly flexible spine for the building that only becomes flexible during earthquakes. The spine loses flexibility when the ground stops shaking and pulls the building back upright, which is very clever. Then there are small innovations like windows having small gaps around the edges so that they can move in the frames and are less likely to shatter. Everything makes a difference and more related inventions are being worked on all the time.

We generally only hear about these natural disasters on the news when something awful has happened / is happening. What we do not hear about is when there are buildings that do stay upright, that there is new technology being developed all the time to help lessen the effects of these disasters and that earthquakes are actually quite fascinating. Why not be optimistic and think, maybe one day planes will be able to fly through volcanic ash safely, tsunamis won’t sweep everything away and earthquakes will cause little or no damage. When I use the “base isolation” method the model building will stay upright for longer than when I use a tuned mass damper or cross-bracing.
 * Conclusion **
 * Hypothesis **

Variables
Dependent: how long the building stays up Independent: stabilising method Controlled: size of building model, weight of building model, earthquake simulation (using shake table)