Newswise — In order to better protect critical buildings and their occupants during a temblor, engineers at the University at Buffalo will subject a life-sized, two-story replica of a fully equipped hospital room to full-scale earthquake vibrations during a demonstration to be held at 3 p.m. on Friday, October 12, in the Structural Engineering and Earthquake Simulation Laboratory (SEESL), located in Ketter Hall on the UB North (Amherst) Campus.
No other facility in the world currently is capable of performing such a test.
The demonstration will be the first to be held in UB's Nonstructural Components Simulator (UB-CNS), a new testing facility, funded by the National Science Foundation, designed specifically to subject costly architectural, mechanical, electrical and plumbing systems in hospitals and other important structures to the precise floor vibrations that they experience during the strongest earthquakes.
The shake test will be webcast at http://seesl.buffalo.edu/projects/ncs/webcast/ at 3 p.m.
The UB-NCS features a two-story-high, four-column swivel test frame supporting two steel grid platforms. Its high-performance hydraulic actuators can push and pull the platforms up to 40 inches in each direction at velocities of 100 inches per second, simulating in real-time how upper floors move during earthquakes.
RSS