 |
|
September 15, 2006 Vol. 77, no.
5F
 |
| CAMPUS WELCOME: A crowd gathers at the August open house to celebrate PEER’s move to Davis Hall from Richmond Field Station. RACHEL SHAFER PHOTO |
PEER relocates to Davis Hall
The center is a mover and shaker in earthquake research
Every day CEE professor Jack Moehle comes to work and wonders if this is the day the big earthquake will hit. He also knows it may not be today, but tomorrow, or the next day, or 100 years from now. “By its nature, earthquake engineering must deal with highly complex and uncertain issues,” says the director of PEER, the Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research Center . “What we’re doing at PEER is defining the uncertainty, creating an engineering framework for interpreting it and fashioning a set of tools so we can give answers to people who make decisions about seismic safety.”
For the last nine years, PEER has been making progress toward just that. On August 30, the research center celebrated its move from Richmond Field Station to campus with an open house at its new offices in Davis Hall. Students, faculty, staff and visitors ate hors d’oeuvre and toured the new space at 325 Davis . “We’re a multidisciplinary center involving researchers in engineering, seismology, architecture, economics and public policy. To encourage multidisciplinary participation, we need to be here in a central campus location,” Moehle says.
PEER was established in 1997 through a grant from the National Science Foundation. It’s headquartered at Berkeley but has affiliates at other West Coast universities.
Since its inception, the center has increasingly focused on performance based engineering, says Moehle. That’s thinking about a building beyond its ability to meet local earthquake building codes to how it will perform over its lifetime. This way structural engineers can let building owners (and insurers) know the probability of a large quake putting them out of business. “We can help them make decisions about seismic safety in the same way they make decisions about financial markets: What is the risk they’re taking?” says Moehle.
One of PEER’s biggest accomplishments, he says, is supporting a Federal Emergency Management Agency-funded project to create national guidelines on how to evaluate buildings for their lifetime performance. The work includes new ground motion models, engineering models for building performance and a range of supporting computer software.
In other work, CEE Ph.D. student Troy Morgan (B.S.’98 M.Eng.’00 CEE), who is a PEER researcher, is analyzing a new isolation bearing system to see how well it behaves, not just in a big earthquake, but also in small and medium-sized ones. (Isolation bearings are placed underneath buildings to help them move better to withstand earthquakes.) “There’s a lot of satisfaction in doing this kind of work,” says the San Jose native. “PEER is in a position to change how building owners think and how engineers work.”
For more information, go to http://peer.berkeley.edu/.
.
|
|
