In this project, we had to build a model of an earthquake resistant building that could withstand a earthquake simulation. We had to build the model out of only spaghetti and blu-tack. It had to meet a lot of certain requirements to be as similar to a real building as possible. These requirements were: it had to have a maximum base of 30x30cm, it has to be taller than 60cm, and it had to be able to balance a 5x5cm square on the top. The spaghetti and blu-tack was also given a price: 1 piece of spaghetti costing $1, and 1 gram of blu-tack costing $1, and we had to get all of the spaghetti and blu tack we needed staying in a budget of $60. The earthquake simulation it had to withstand was a shake table which was shaking in 3 different ways to simulate the 3 types of seismic waves in an earthquake – P waves, S waves and surface waves. This project is very valuable because in todays society, earthquakes cause a lot of horrible damage and deaths across the world. Doing this project shows how we need to think of ways to earthquake proof buildings in countries where earthquakes are very common to stop the destruction and devastation, and it shows how quickly an earthquake can completely knock over and destroy a building.
The engineering process consisted of us planning, prototyping and building our model earthquake resistant building. We started off by doing a design sprint lesson, where we were given some materials and just tested different ways of building the model. Me and my group built the building, but we got very impatient with it and knocked it over, so that wasn’t very good and we had to improve on this next time. After the design sprint, we had to construct a full plan of our building design and costs. We decided to make our building predominantly of triangles: the base is a triangle, and the walls have small triangles enforcing them. We decided on this because triangles are the strongest shape, meaning that it will made our building overall stronger and less likely to fall over. Triangles help to prevent earthquakes because the triangle shape causes buildings to sway less during an earthquake rather than a rectangular building because they offer increased resistance to twisting which is often the cause of major damage during a severe earthquake. We made a detailed drawing of what our building will look like, shown below, so we were able to know what to build in the day when we build it. We also calculated our costs in this lesson to make sure we were in the budget and we would have enough to build the whole building.
After we finished the planning process, we had a double period to do our final build + test. We went pretty well while building it, except for a few small errors that cost us. Raphie accidentally snapped one piece, and instead of replacing it we just glued it back together with blue-tack which caused it our model to have a massive slant in it. Instead of going back and fixing this early on before it caused a big issue, we left it and thought it would be ok but it was not. It caused our building to be on a massive slant, and it was leaning far to the side before it even got on the shake table. The outcome of this was that our building very quickly lent and fell over when faced with the earthquake simulation shake table. Next time we could improve on this by making sure we fix errors at the start so we do not get massive slants.
Overall, this project was very fun and was very valuable in teaching a lesson about how devastating earthquakes can be on building, and how we can engineer buildings to be earthquake proof.