My research area is Earthquake Engineering and I'm working on Strucural Control, i.e., to control the structural responses, by the way to minimize the damage to the structures due to earthquakes, by using some energy dissipating devices, called 'dampers', under the dynamic and able supervision of
Prof. R.S. Jangid.
Increasing population and growing social and commercial activities but limited land resources available in a modern city lead to more and more buildings being built closely to each other. These buildings, in most cases, are separated without any structural connections or are connected only at the ground level. Hence, wind-resistant or earthquake-resistant capacity of each building mainly depends on itself. The ground motion during earthquakes causes damage to the structures a lot. Tall structures are extremely vulnerable to the structural damage because the masses are relatively large, supporeted by slender columns. The displacement of the upper storeis is very large as compared to the lower ones, so that if the separation distances between adjacent buildings are not sufficient, mutual 'pounding' (the collison of two buildings) may occur during an earthquake when they vibrate out of phase with each other, which was observed in the 1985 Mexico City earthquake, 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake and many other.
The two, well established and widely used, technologies to minimize the damage to the structures due to earthquakes are
1. Structural Control
2. Base Isolation
To avoid mutual pounding between adjacent buildings during an earthwauke, one of the ways is to connect them with the dampers. In my work, two adjacent buildings are being connected with the dampers to mitigate the seismic response of the structures, which automatically avoids pounding also. |
