Contact: Andrew Careaga, [email protected]
ROLLA, Mo. -- A University of Missouri-Rolla professor's new textbook about earthquake engineering comes at a good time for engineers and engineering students, as the book addresses changes in building codes for making structures more earthquake-proof.
The new seismic engineering codes are the subject of an entire chapter in "Matrix Analysis of Structural Dynamics: Applications and Earthquake Engineering," the new textbook written by Dr. Franklin Y. Cheng, Curators' Professor Emeritus of civil engineering at UMR. The book, published by Marcel Dekker Inc., is being released in September with an accompanying solutions manual for instructors.
According to Cheng, the chapter on seismic codes is one of the most valuable chapters for working engineers, as it details the changes from earlier standards and compares the older codes with the new set.
"In the United States, we've had at least three building codes to go by" in recent years, says Cheng, who has more than 30 years of experience in earthquake engineering studies. In Missouri, for example, engineers have gone by the codes established by the Building Officials and Code Administrators International Inc., or BOCA, last updated in 1999. BOCA was founded in 1915. Southern states, meanwhile, have adopted the Standard Building Code (SBC), also updated in 1999, and provided by Southern Building Code International since 1940. Other states, including earthquake-prone California, have adhered to the more stringent Uniform Building Code (UBC), which was enacted in 1927 by the International Conference of Building Officials and last revised in 1997.
The three code organizations got together to develop a new set of earthquake-resistant building design provisions, and the result was the International Building Code, or IBC-2000, published in May 2000 by the International Code Council.
This new code supercedes all others and is "more stringent and scientifically more reasonable" than any of the previous codes, Cheng says, because it takes into account changes in modern building design and construction.
"As computer technology rapidly advances and buildings become taller and more slender, dynamic behavior of such structures must be studied" using the latest methods, Cheng writes in the preface to his book.
Cheng's book is the first to examine the new seismic codes. "Because of my previous research on the topic and on these codes, in addition to explaining the theory behind these changes, I have also outlined the changes in codes over time," he says. This feature will help readers better understand the differences between previous codes and the new IBC, Cheng says.
In July 2000, Cheng co-presented a paper titled "Evolutionary Features of the New International Building Code (IBC-2000)" at the International Conference on Ocean-Atmosphere Sciences and Technology in Taipei, Taiwan. Presenting with him were Dr. George C. Lee, director of the Multidisciplinary Center for Earthquake Engineering Research at the University of Buffalo, N.Y., and Z.Q. Wang, a Ph.D. candidate in civil engineering at UMR.
Cheng also is conducting earthquake engineering research with engineers at Tongji University in Shanghai, China. That research is supported by the National Science Foundation.
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