E-Defense shake-table test data

This project is developing a new structural system to protect buildings, their contents, and occupants during large earthquakes and will enable immediate post-earthquake occupancy. This earthquake-resilient structural system is particularly focused on essential facilities, such as hospitals, where damage to buildings and contents and occupant injuries must be prevented and where continuous occupancy performance is imperative. The new system uses practical structural components to economically protect a building from damaging displacements and accelerations. The project team in the United States is collaborating with Japanese researchers to study the new system with full-scale earthquake simulations using the E-Defense facility located in Miki, Japan, and operated by the National Research Institute for Earth Science and Disaster Resilience. This project advances national health, prosperity, and welfare by preventing injuries and loss of human life and minimizing social and economic disruption of buildings due to large earthquakes. This project contributes to the National Science Foundation's role in the National Earthquake Hazards Reduction Program.

The novel steel frame-spine lateral force-resisting system with force-limiting connections (FLC) that is developed in this project seeks to control multi-modal seismic response to protect a building and provide resilient structural and non-structural building performance. This frame-spine-FLC system comprises a conventional, economical base system that resists a significant proportion of the lateral load. The system judiciously employs floor-level force-limiting deformable connections and an elastic spine to protect the base system. Integrated experiments and numerical simulations are providing comprehensive understanding of the new frame-spine-FLC system, including rich full-scale experimental data on building seismic performance. Yielding components for FLCs are tested using the NHERI facility at Lehigh University. This project is conducted in collaboration with an ongoing synergistic research program in Japan. The dataset will enable the advancement of computational modeling for the assessment of building performance and the development of practical, accurate models for use in design that capture the complex structural response that occurs during an earthquake.