As most of you who reads this blog knows, I came back to Ithaca early to work on the MEng project. For the project, we have to analyze a building built in the early 90s in LA and which was hit by the 1994 Northridge Earthquake. The team is divided three groups: ground motions group who works on getting the time history and acceleration of the earthquake hitting the structure, the modeling group who models the structure and analyzes the overall building response, and the connections group who analyzes what happen at the connections as a result of the earthquake. As of right now, the ground motions group is mostly done with their part and has been absorbed into the modeling group.
This particular structure is tedious to model for it was quite irregular. There are 8 floors, 3 below ground and 5 above. Overall there are hundreds of beams and columns to keep track of. The software which we are using requires behavioral properties, not sectional properties of the members since we are performing a non-linear analysis. As a result, we have to manually find these properties, put it into the software and make sure that they correspond correctly.
Since starting on Wednesday, we had been busy just putting the model on the computer and calculating these behavioral properties.
2 comments:
Which group are/were you on? Once you put in the structure, do you get a video representation of an earthquake hitting the building? That sounds so cool!
I'm on the modeling group. I guess I forgot to include that :-P
I'm not sure yet. Maybe once we figure out more on how to use the software...
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