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Participants in this project will be working with Dr Adam Crewe and Dr Wendy Daniell in the Earthquake Engineering Research Centre at Bristol University. Adam and Wendy are very keen to have ideas for really new and ingenious design concepts for buildings which can resist earthquakes. And of course they are very keen to build in ideas from people who live in Japan and who experience earthquakes much more than we do in the UK. The following is what Wendy and Adam want you to do.
After having some background information, you will be asked to design and construct a model of a building that is capable of resisting earthquakes. We will give you wood, paper, string and glue with which to make your model. You will build it on a 250 mm square base board and you will be given rules for the size of your model; its total height will be at least 450 mm. The model must also be able to carry weights on each floor, without collapsing, when it is standing still.
You will be working in three small UK-Japan teams, in friendly competition against each other, trying to come up with the best design. To find out whether your have come up with a good design, we will test your model on our shaking-table, an earthquake simulator which we use in our research.
We have set up a web-site called IDEERS which will be running a project like this as a competition for UK schools next year. The website has just been completed, so you will be the first students to use it properly. The web-site explains the rules for how your model should be constructed and what forces it should be able to resist. If you visit the site, you will be able to prepare yourself for the Earthquake Engineering Challenge by reading the COMPETITION pages. If you visit the Model Gallery, you can see examples of models that our undergraduate students have made. Don't get too excited about the prizes on offer though, as those are really for next years' UK competition! However, we will be giving a small prize to the best model in the Japan 2001 Workshop.
On the IDEERS web-site, you can find advice on how to design your models. You can also find out about techniques that engineers use to make buildings stand up to earthquakes. You may want to do your own research to find out about other techniques that are not on the IDEERS web-site.
Don't worry if you think you don't know enough to do the Earthquake Engineering Challenge. Earthquake Engineering Researchers at the University of Bristol will be helping you through this project. So, by the time you finish, you will certainly know a lot more, have achieved something, and you will have had a good time.
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