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April 17, 2006 Vol. 77, no.
13S
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| TEAM
BUILDING: Members of Berkeley’s
seismic design team measure and cut hundreds of balsa wood
beams and columns in preparation for assembling their model.
Pictured are, from left, Architecture senior Alfred Twu, and
CEE seniors Eric Nguyen, Kristin Tso and Lorraine Young. (Photo
provided by Eric Nguyen)
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A performance
that won’t bring down the house
CEE students ready their building design for PEER seismic competition
Here’s a challenge: Build a 30-floor office building that withstands
a large earthquake, is structurally innovative, aesthetically pleasing
and delivers the highest financial return for the building’s
owner over its lifetime. It sounds like a tall order (no pun intended)
but represents a typical situation for California’s structural
engineers.
That’s why this exact assignment was given to eight engineering
teams from around the country competing in the second annual Undergraduate
Seismic Design Competition. The competition, which takes place April
19-20 in San Francisco, is part of the National Conference on Earthquake
Engineering. This year, the conference will commemorate the centennial
anniversary of the 1906 San Francisco quake.
Though a real-world challenge, teams will not use concrete and mortar
to build a building, but balsa wood and Elmer’s glue to construct
a five-foot model. And, while they won’t win a client contract,
the pressure is real. Models will be subjected to earthquakes up to
7.2 on a shake table, and teams must deliver presentations justifying
their design’s feasibility, economics and architectural merit
to a panel of judges.
CEE senior Eric Nguyen is leading Berkeley’s team of six civies
and two architecture students. Nguyen serves on the Pacific Earthquake
Engineer-ing Research (PEER) Center’s Student Leadership Council,
which is organizing the competition. He got involved in PEER last summer
when he took a related research position at Stanford. “I wasn’t
really interested in earthquake engineering before that,” he
says. “Now, I want to pursue it as a career.” Nguyen isn’t
a stranger to earthquakes. The 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake rattled
his family’s home. Nguyen, five at the time, first hid under
a glass coffee table, then fled down stairs. “All things you’re
not supposed to do,” he adds.
Nguyen’s model will be smarter. For the last three months, the
group has been designing its building within certain constraints. The
floorplan has to be as open as possible to maximize revenue, but it
also has to be an interesting shape, more than just a square. Structurally,
it can neither sway too much in an earthquake nor hold too rigidly,
but feature something besides a seismic isolation system (typically
a building on rollers). “Surprisingly, the engineers wanted
all these cool and complicated ideas, but the architecture students
were realistic and grounded,” Nguyen says.
The team settled on a floorplan shaped like a squatty American Red
Cross symbol. The points of the cross contain extended beams on the
outside to give the building an Asian architectural flourish. It also
features an innovative building-within-a building earthquake design
with viscous material to serve as a cushion between them. Each “building” shakes
at a different rate and makes contact with the viscous material, which
will slow both down to reduce the entire structure’s movements.
That’s the plan, and Nguyen is confident that Berkeley is competitive. “We
want to beat UC Davis, which won first last year,” he says. “We
definitely want to win.”
For more information, go to http://peer.berkeley.edu/students/Seismic.html.
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