Quake Simulator Coming to University of Alabama

There aren’t very many rooms in the world that can successfully reproduce the devastating effects of an earthquake. But come May 1, a laboratory on the University of Alabama campus may be able to do just that.

Work is under way to outfit the laboratory within UA’s South Engineering Research Center with what is called a shake table to subject building design codes and materials to nature’s wrath in a controlled environment. “In essence, the table is a large piece of steel that moves back and forth and represents the motion of the earth. This particular table is designed to be used to collapse structures,” said John van de Lindt, professor in UA’s civil construction and environmental engineering program. “We want to know the margin against structure collapses. We can’t know that unless we know exactly how these structures collapse.”

Van de Lindt left Colorado State University, a place with a lot more seismic activity, to work at UA. “We’re doing this work here because, from an educational standpoint, we’re educating global engineers,” he said. “The engineers we put out into the world are ready to go out and meet anything, and this is a global problem.”

He said the lab will be one of a kind in the Southeast and one of no more than 10 similar laboratories nationwide. The testing should shed light on whether design codes in earthquake engineering have been too strong or not strong enough.