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Better construction

Rigorous earthquake tests set to improve building design.

US engineering researchers have concluded three months of earthquake simulations on a one-million pound precast concrete structure on a shake table at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering’s Englekirk Structural Engineering Center.

The engineers produced a series of earthquake jolts as powerful as magnitude 8.0 on a structure resembling a parking garage.

Now, the engineering researchers will sift through the results of the tests in an effort to improve the future designs of buildings.

“One of the purposes of our research is to develop better designs for precast concrete buildings,” said Jose Restrepo, co-principal investigator of the project and a structural engineering professor at UC San Diego’s Jacobs School of Engineering. “The results of our research have been tremendous.”

Precast concrete is built in pieces and then assembled to construct buildings. The material has been an innovative for the construction industry in terms of saving time and money.

Although precast concrete has been proven to be a robust design material for structures in the US, the researchers are working to provide the industry with new methods of connecting these pieces more efficiently.

“This is really important to our industry because we’ll be able to develop structures that can resist nature’s most difficult loads, including earthquakes,” said Tom D’Arcy, spokesman for the Precast/Prestressed Institute and chairman of The Consulting Engineers Group, Inc. in the US.

The results of this research are expected to be implemented into the United States within the next few years. The researchers hope that an improvement in building design will help avoid building catastrophes like what happened during the 6.7 magnitude earthquake in Northridge, California, in 1994, with the collapse of several precast parking structures.

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