Originally published at: Watch the Tuned Mass Damper inside a Taipei skyscraper react to this weekend's 6.9-magnitude earthquake | Boing Boing
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Scary and amazing at the same time. A true marvel of engineering and architecture.
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Indeed - a wonderful thing!
(Second video better than the first due to being a fixed camera. It should be a permanently on webcam.)
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Exuding quiet gravitas while doing its job. I love it.
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For anyone curious, skyscrapers tend to be safer in earthquakes than short buildings, even without dampers. Tall buildings are more flexible and can literally bend like a willow branch. Short buildings are more rigid and thus get shaken to bits. I’ve been in a magnitude 5.5 (epicentre on a few km away) near the top of a 30 story building and it was a wild ride. It was like standing in a huge bowl of Jell-O. Very unsettling. Building was fine, though they inspected it to be sure.
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This is cool. Practical Engineering in action!
Just a comment on the frame of reference, the building was moving around the sphere first. I do not know the max distance the sphere moves with respect to the earth frame.
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That is amazing; and looks like something from SPC Foundation.
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I was going to say something like that. I would guess that with that much mass and that rapid of a movement, the sphere is pretty much stationary and the building is moving around the stationary sphere which stabilizes the building,
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Exactly, and the shock absorbers bleed off the kinetic energy. So I expect the building to continue swaying after the earthquake is finished until the sphere is stationary once more.
I have not researched it, but I wonder what is the design max earthquake.
I think the reason the sphere moved a meter in the storm was, the building was moved by a constant wind load versus earthquake shaking forces and displaced the sphere. The max displacement may have been when the wind subsided.
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It’s like with glass footbridges, where it might feel unsafe, but for that very reason, the engineering is much more thorough than for some reassuringly chunky old stone bridge. You might be able to cut corners on a cheap 5-over-1 or a strip mall, but if you build a skyscraper in an earthquake zone, someone’s for sure going to check your working.
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A big part of that is because, whether they’re specifically engineered to withstand earthquakes or not, most tall buildings are steel-framed because it’s very difficult to build a high-rise that doesn’t collapse under its own weight without a lot of steel. Famously the Washington Monument is the tallest unreinforced masonry structure in the world, and it suffered millions of dollars in damage in D.C.’s little quake back in 2011.
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Like jetliner crashes, massive engineering failures DO happen, but they’re rare enough to be notable.
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That Mass sure is damp.
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■■■■■?
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Interesting and counterintuitive. Is there a height where they reach a point of diminishing returns? Or will space elevators be intrinsically earthquake proof?
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Good question! I don’t know the answer!
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Its responsibility must weigh heavily on it.
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It is always a pleasure to see Caitlin Doughty.
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She rocks!
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