Man: Okay, Northridge at 100% back to back.
In five, four, three, two, one.
[Warning horn]
Dan Dolan: The shake table is an instrument that for doing research,
most of them are funded by the National Science Foundation
to replicate realistic records from earthquakes
in full scale,
both displacement and acceleration
so that you can do proof of concepts
and full structural analysis
rather than just components.
It's outdoor so you don't have a height restriction on your specimen.
Shiling Pei: We have been building tall buildings with steel
and concrete for over 100 years.
So far is you want to build anything over ten stories,
you have to use those two structures
as your lateral or main structure system.
So this test will be the first step to validate a concept
that we can build up to the same height with timber,
which is a dependable material which support a rural economy, also renewable.
Dan Dolan: Concrete is a very energy intensive material
to manufacture compared to wood.
And wood sequesters carbon
so that your overall carbon footprint
of the building is very much reduced.
But environmental reasons are not going to drive
the use of this kind of material.
The economics come from the marketplace.
If it's not economically viable, the market is not going to use it.
Period.
Jeff Berman: By having this kind of interlocking system,
this kind of Lego system, where all the pieces are fabricated,
brought to site and are easily put together,
we can really minimize construction time
and we can really minimize the cost of construction.
Dan Dolan: And as you start having more and more projects
that are use CLT, and the economics behind it,
the developers will start seeing the economic benefits
and it'll take off from there.
The earthquake table test is to provide evidence of it
can safely be built in high seismic regions
and we have good parameters in how to design it.
Jeff Berman: There's a really significant benefit
to having a building that can be repaired
very quickly following an earthquake.
You save in repair costs but also you save in downtime,
downtime is money to whoever occupies a building like this.
This is a transformational research project really.
I mean we don't do structural design like this today.
This is how we hope to see structural design happen.
This idea of designing for resilience,
for ease of repair.
Dan Dolan: You can put up a building at a story a day
with only four workers where concrete and other materials,
you're requiring up to like three weeks
before you get per story.
Tall buildings are going to be constructed in eight
to ten months' shorter period of time.
You're saving over a million dollars a building
by just what you pay in interest
on that kind of construction financing for building these buildings.
The accelerated construction rate is really what's driving this.
Shiling Pei: We're going to test this structure. We're going to gather data.
We're going to show the new system,
the post tension rocking wall timber,
the rocking wall system is resilient after a couple of shakes.
Sarah Wichman: With this rocking wall,
the idea is that things in this structure will yield
and will damage, but it's controlled damage, so the bars,
like in a very large earthquake would probably yield.
But all you would have to do after an earthquake
is to repost tension the bars or put in new bars.
Jeff Berman: It is the research that will help
to make communities more resilient,
to minimize repair costs after big earthquakes.
Without NSF funding,
industry will not push in this direction.
They will do what they know and what they know
is what they've always been doing.
So without NSF research to be able to demonstrate
how easy it is to build this,
how easy it is to repair this, how well it performs,
without that NSF funding to get this off
the ground, adoption would be a non-starter.
Shiling Pei: This type of testing it is too much to take on
by a single institution.
We do need NSF support of this facility to make this work for everybody.
Dan Dolan: There's a lot of ways that it's an overall
American society benefits
from this test.
To try and get a new structural system into the market
to reduce the cost of housing,
to reduce the cost of commercial construction,
to improve the rate of construction
and allow the overall society
to benefit from it.