Will your designs be able to take a shake? Terms and Concepts You also have the option to measure how hard your earthquake table shakes using the accelerometer of a smartphone and a sensor app. By building structures of different heights, you will test if increasing the height of the structure has an effect on the stability of the building. In this experiment, you will build your own miniature shake-table which you will use to test your own LEGO buildings. You can see the LEGO structures before and after the shake (photos from PEER, Date Unknown). At UC Irvine, students at the Learning With LEGO program get to see if their LEGO structures can handle the shake-table. Here, they host an annual contest where student teams build and test their LEGO® buildings for stability (Figure 2).įigure 2. One very large shake table is at the Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research Center (PEER) at the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of California, Irvine. A shake table is a special type of table that engineers use to simulate an earthquake on model buildings. One way to test a design for stability to lateral forces is to use a shake table. Some of the world's tallest buildings, like the Petronas Towers, are an excellent example of this type of design because Malaysia is in an area that experiences frequent earthquake activity. If an engineer is going to design a building in earthquake country, then they need to be sure that their design can withstand lateral forces. Earthquakes occur when the earth's tectonic plates, which are slowly moving relative to each other, get stuck for a while and then suddenly come loose. One type of force that can weaken a structure is a lateral (side-to-side) shaking force, like that experienced during an earthquake. If the design is stable, then these forces will not weaken the structure or cause the structure to collapse. Forces come from many sources: gravity, people inside, weight of building materials, weather, and environmental impacts. The Burj Khalifa in the city of Dubai, United Arab Emirates (Wikipedia user Donaldytong).Īn engineer designs a building to withstand forces, or things that push and pull on the building. 'The Effect of Structural Height on Building Stability,' Selah Intermediate School, Selah, WA.įigure 1. Retrieved March 6, 2007, from this URL, but no longer available online:

'The Effect of Wind Load on a Building ,' Selah Intermediate School, Selah, WA. Learning With LEGO: School-University Partnership (SUP) for Earthquake Engineering Education, Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research Center (PEER). Shake Table for Testing Structures in Earthquake Country, Resource Area for Teaching (RAFT), San Jose, CA. This project idea is based on a simple design for a shake-table posted on RAFT, the Learning with LEGO PEER project at UC Irvine, and science fair projects posted from Selah Intermediate School in Selah, WA: LEGO is a registered trademark of the LEGO Group. Edited by Ben Finio, PhD, Science Buddies

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