"It would dampen some of the motions certainly. "It would take care of a smaller earthquake, I would think," says Deke Smith, Executive Director of the Building Seismic Safety Council and the buildingSMART alliance, part of the National Institute of Building Sciences, Washington, DC. The system will be added to new, otherwise typically built homes of an appropriate weight, and can be retrofitted to existing structures as well. When the mock tremors hit, in front of a rapt, hardhat-outfitted audience, the denizens hardly noticed, and not a drop of wine was spilled. The company built such a house on a "shake table" and equipped it with a few inhabitants, some furniture, and a couple of glasses of wine. Then the airbag deflates and the house gently settles back down.ĭiagram of how a house would levitate during an earthquake. There the structure will hover, its inhabitants able to casually go about their business, for the duration of the quake. The compressor pumps air into an airbag, inflating it within a few more seconds, and ultimately lifting the entire house a good three centimeters off its supposedly earthquake-proof concrete foundation. When sensors feel a tremor, they switch on a compressor within a second.
The product of inventor Shoichi Sakamoto, the house sits, during more stable times, on a deflated air bag. That's the general idea behind the levitating house developed by the Japanese company Air Danshin. What better way to avoid tragedy then, but by tossing a house in the air when an earthquake comes?
Look at the statistics-or the photographs-and you'll know that the vast majority of fatalities from earthquakes large or small come from buildings, or parts of buildings, falling on people. People's houses in the midst of earthquakes kill people.
0 kommentar(er)
