World’s largest shake table reveals how earthquakes damage wood-framed buildings

Assistant Professor Maria Koliou of Texas A&M University’s Zachry Department of Civil Engineering is leading an interdisciplinary study with researchers from six other US research universities and Nagoya University in Japan into how earthquakes damage residential wood-framed buildings. Researchers recently gathered data during a series of tests at Japan’s E-Defense, the world’s largest shake table. The results should help communities repair damaged buildings and their surrounding infrastructure more quickly. The collaboration is part of a National Science Foundation (NSF) Rapid Response research project under a partnership between the NSF-funded Natural Hazards Engineering Research Infrastructure (NHERI) and Japan’s National Research Institute for Earth Science and Disaster Resilience (NIED).