Engineering Resilient Buildings: Surviving Earthquakes

🏢 Earthquakes can cause buildings to collapse due to the forceful shifting of tectonic plates.

🌎 Building designs must consider the location's earthquake guidelines and intensity of forces.

💰 Creating earthquake-proof buildings is possible but costly.

🏢 Designing earthquake-resistant buildings involves making them stronger or more flexible.

⚙️ Reinforcing concrete with steel is one way to make buildings stronger, but base isolation is more effective in high-risk areas.

🏛️ Base isolation, a concept dating back to the 4th century, involves building a structure on a separate base to minimize building movement during earthquakes.

🏢 Taipei 101 uses a giant ball called a “tuned mass damper” to combat earthquakes by swinging the opposite direction when the building sways.

🔬 Researchers are developing technology to make buildings invisible to shock waves using a shield made of concrete and plastic buried underground.

🌊 The shield surrounding the building has strips that become stiffer the further they are from the core, allowing the shock waves to travel more easily through a stiff and hard layer.

⚡️ The design of buildings is crucial for earthquake survival

🔍 The curvature of tectonic plates helps protect buildings from shock waves

🌍 Earthquakes are measured using the Richter scale