Week 4 – The Proposal

This week we met with Dr. Hamid, our faculty advisor, as well as Fatemeh, our lab graduate fellow. They had graded our proposal and website and gave us feedback. They loved it!

Upon inspection of our building structure, they gave us some advice on how to improve it:

• Tape the floors to the K’nex

• Secure structure to floor better

• Bottom floors must be equal size

• Find a way to add mass to the top floor

• Bring the base up

• The slope of the columns needs to be less

• The mass above the ground is the most important

• The slope has to be less significant

• Design doesn’t have to match the proposal – then document the change and why – “have to change the design to see difference in changes”

With these comments we modified our testing methods. We taped both structures to the shake table at each structure’s four corners. The first part of the test was to move the shake table at a lower frequency, with less vibrations. The second part was at a higher frequency with more vibrations.

Each part included three trials for a total of six trials. Each trial was approximately thirty seconds. The table was moved at a constant motion for those thirty seconds to see what the simulated earthquake would do to our structures.

We are still testing and finding ways to perfect our structure.