Assessment of Non-Engineered Structures through Shock Table Test

Abstract

In India year after year disaster cause much misery and hardship to the people. The earthquake of 26th January’ 2001 was a grim reminder of vulnerable structures that we have been building in our country. Even four years after that disaster a question that still confronts us is “how can such destruction be prevented in future?” The only answer to that is “we have to build houses with disaster resistant technologies that are affordable”. The main hurdles in ensuing this in regards to the non-engineered building that constitute overwhelming percentage of structures in the country have been the lack of know-how and confidence in these technologies among people, Engineers, contractors and masons. This paper is aiming towards spreading technical know-how of behavior of non-engineered structures under natural disaster like earthquakes. The mean to convey the technology is based on ‘seeing is believing ’ – a shock table test. Two half-scale models representing non-engineered structures were tested on shock table to understand the earthquake resistant features of non-engineered structures. The accelerations imparted into models through shocks and subsequent observations of distress in the models were demonstrated. The amounts of energy imparted to the models were also calculated to understand the magnitude of shock given to the shock table. Lastly, the conclusions based on observations of models are presented.