Creative Engineering Design:
Earthquake and Tsunami Safe Gyms
For this Stem project our objective was to create something that would solve a world problem. The first step of this project was brainstorming ideas of problems that can be solved. After coming up with a list of ideas, my group thought about which one seemed most practical and we got our idea of making a safe house during earthquakes and tsunami’s. Now that we had our idea picked out we had to figure out why is this an important problem. After doing research, we found that from 6 major earthquakes from 2001-2011 that around 735,408 people died in these earthquakes and tsunamis.
The next thing that we focused on researching was how to make a building earthquake and tsunami safe. We researched different kinds of earthquake proofing like base isolation and rollers. We then decided base isolation would be cheaper and work better for our design. Base isolators basically work by making the whole building sway with the earth instead of only part of the building against it, which causes buildings to collapse. Base isolators are made up of layers of rubber and stifling plates with a lead plug and attachment plates. Next we researched materials of buildings that hold against tsunami waves and found out that the most resistant material was reinforced concrete. So we used base isolators to hold the building up in the earthquake and reinforced concrete walls to withstand the powerful tsunami waves.
The next thing that we focused on researching was how to make a building earthquake and tsunami safe. We researched different kinds of earthquake proofing like base isolation and rollers. We then decided base isolation would be cheaper and work better for our design. Base isolators basically work by making the whole building sway with the earth instead of only part of the building against it, which causes buildings to collapse. Base isolators are made up of layers of rubber and stifling plates with a lead plug and attachment plates. Next we researched materials of buildings that hold against tsunami waves and found out that the most resistant material was reinforced concrete. So we used base isolators to hold the building up in the earthquake and reinforced concrete walls to withstand the powerful tsunami waves.
Now that we had all that information we thought of what kind of building would be most useful and we came up with a safe house school gym. This way we could have a safe house building that can still be used for other purposes. We came up with a design of an aluminum roof, for safety of the roof not collapsing and still able to hold against water, the reinforced concrete walls, for withstanding powerful waves, and base isolators, to hold against the earthquake. The point of the building is that it survives the earthquake and in the few minute time gap before the tsunami hits, teachers can get all their students to safety. We roughly estimated the material cost to be around 2,098,705.72 without the cost to build it. Our final goal is to save the next generation form natural disasters. Since we didn’t have enough time to build a nice scale model, we created a to scale simulation of it to show what it would look like if it were actually built.
Physics concepts
Engineering Design Cycle- the process at which an engineer goes threw to solve a problem. There are nine simple steps in this process. The nine steps are:
1) Identify the need
2) Research the problem
3) Develop possible solutions
4) Select the most promising solution
5) Construct a prototype
6) Test and evaluate the prototype
7) Communicate design
8) Redesign
9) Repeat
1) Identify the need
2) Research the problem
3) Develop possible solutions
4) Select the most promising solution
5) Construct a prototype
6) Test and evaluate the prototype
7) Communicate design
8) Redesign
9) Repeat
Reflection
I believe this project went really well and was very fun. I liked how we had so many choices of what are project could be and we could really research something we were interested in. I think being able to this made us use our short time as best as we could for the project. Something I think our whole group did well at was getting a lot and working hard together. I know for myself I gained new Minecraft building skills and also gained functionality judgment skills to see what would be best for the building to be safe and work. Something we could have done better at was making sure we had all our information earlier on instead of getting more later. We could have probably gone over our presentation one more time since in the real thing the computer shut off and the simulation closed, so the computer had to be restarted. We could have also done more research on building damage in the future. Over all the project was good and would be very helpful to have in the real world.