Bringing the house down

(UB) earthquake engineers are launching a series of unprecedented seismic tests on a full-scale, wood-frame townhouse over the next nine months. The 33,000kg, 167m2 townhouse will be the largest wooden structure to undergo seismic testing on a shake table in the

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The testing at UB is part of a $1.4 million international project called NEESWood, funded by the National Science Foundation's George E. Brown Jr. Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES).

In November, the full-scale, furnished, three-bedroom, two-bathroom townhouse will be subjected to the most violent shaking possible in a laboratory, mimicking what an earthquake that occurs only once every 2,500 years would generate.

In that final test, the townhouse is expected to suffer massive damage, according to computer simulations performed by the UB researchers and colleagues at other NEESWood institutions.

To gather the data, the UB researchers are equipping the townhouse with 250 sensors that will provide detailed information about how each nook and cranny behaves during each simulated earthquake.