UCLA Engineering: UCLA Engineer Magazine

Conference Draws Students from Across California for Seismic Design Challenge

On March 31, an earthquake measuring magnitude 6.7 on the Richter scale shook student dormitories in Los Angeles. And if the building architects found the shuddering eerily reminiscent of 1994’s Northridge temblor, that’s because the movements from this simulated quake were exactly the same as that frightening natural disaster.

During the 2006 Pacific Southwest Regional Conference of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), students had the chance to test out their scale-model dormitory buildings against the Northridge quake—as replicated by the recently completed “Shake Lab” at the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science.

The annual student conference, which ran from March 30 to April 1, was hosted by UCLA Engineering and brought nearly 500 civil engineering undergraduates from Southern California, Arizona and Nevada to Los Angeles to engage in tasks that include designing and building an earthquake-safe building, constructing and racing concrete canoes, and erecting a model steel bridge. A key highlight of the conference was the relatively new seismic design challenge for which teams from seven California schools were selected. The students had four months to complete their designs, from conception to execution.

The 2006 seismic design challenge was to build a three-story, scale-model wood dormitory meeting specific land size and cost requirements. All of the models were tested on the shake table with ground motions recorded during medium and large earthquakes—with the large one this year mirroring the Northridge quake at its epicenter. UC San Diego’s winning building met the pre-set design criteria and cost parameters, and emerged with the least amount of damage after the “big one” hit. Cal Poly Pomona placed second, and UCLA third.

The competition was hosted by nees@UCLA, an equipment site specializing in the field testing and monitoring of structural performance. The lab is part of the NSF George E. Brown, Jr. Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation, a national, network of geographically-distributed, shared-use experimental research equipment sites.

- Melissa Abraham

Photo courtesy of nees@UCLA