Shake tables are becoming increasingly popular teaching tools to help civil engineering students grasp complex concepts of structural dynamics and earthquake engineering.
These teaching systems are great because bypass dry theory to offer engaging, hands-on experiments that allow students to ‘experience’ an earthquake in the safety of a lab. Why are shake tables becoming so popular?
Easy to Use and Portable
The University of Eastern London’s School of Architecture, Computing, and Engineering (ACE) uses the Quanser Shake Table II in a number of study areas, including the determination of natural frequencies in multi-DOF structures, and the seismic response of building frames.
It is used by both students (to understand theoretical concepts in ACE’s Civil Engineering courses) and researchers (to expand their work in seismic response of base-isolated structures and soil-structure interaction).
Dr. Mihaela Anca Ciupala, Senior Lecturer at ACE, has said they added the Shake Table II to their lab because “It’s ideal for teaching purposes because it is easy to use, accessible, portable. And since it has simple software operation, it helps a large number of students to understand and complete projects in a relatively short time.”
You can learn more about how the university is using shake tables in this case study.
Simulate Real-life Earthquakes in the Lab
Ultimately, students would rather see their building stand up to a simulated earthquake than a pre-defined sinusoidal.
There are various earthquake databases — like the PEER Strong Motion Database — where users can download displacement, velocity, and acceleration data of earthquakes recorded worldwide. However when using this data you’ll have to scale down the recorded data to simulate these earthquakes on a shake table. You can find more information on how to do that on Quanser’s blog here.
The point is: using ground motions from actual earthquakes is way more fun for students. See for yourself as students test their structures at the Annual EERI Undergraduate Student Design Competition:
Flexibility of Experiments
Beyond earthquake engineering, shake tables can cover control systems, robotics, mechatronics, test and measurement, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, and aerospace control and dynamics.
Purdue University uses the Quanser Shake Table II and Active Mass Damper structures to demonstrate the dynamics of building structures to first-year graduate students.
San Francisco State University has brought together modern pedagogy, a Shake Table earthquake simulator, and the qdex eLearning platform to significantly improve civil and mechanical engineering students’ learning outcomes and experiences. Read more about the specifics of the program here.
You can also actually check out SFSU’s Mobile Remote Shake Table Laboratory yourself, where you can run experiments on their shake table. Pretty cool!
Easily Scaled for Collaborative Projects
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Tongji University’s College of Civil Engineering, has recently expanded their program from one to five Shake Table II’s. Quanser’s s open architecture control software, QUARC for MATLAB/Simulink, makes it easy to control several tables at the same time. Students can conduct multi-point shaking experiments on bridge structures, or shake bigger structures using multiple shake tables.
Tongji — along with other civil engineering schools in China — are actually doing collaborative work with universities in North America too.
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Experimental Validation of Research
This is a popular application for engineering research labs. For example, researchers from the Universidad de Santiago de Chile, Universidad Nacional del Litoral (Argentina), Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile, and Rice University collaboratively studied the problem of sloshing using the finite element analysis, based on solving the Navier-Stokes equations of incompressible fluids using a monolithic solver.
To validate the numerical results, the research team used the Shake Table II to control the motion of a rectangular tank with ultrasonic sensors. The team published the results of their work in the Journal of Computational Mechanics, in the article titled “Finite element computation and experimental validation of sloshing in rectangular tanks.”
Want to learn more about the shake tables we offer? Don’t hesitate to contact us for pricing information, case studies, and detailed specs.
