Getting to the Bottom of It: The Effect of Different Foundations on Resistance to Superstructure Collapse

Overview

Earthquakes pose significant threat to the world. In areas like California and Japan, deadly earthquakes occur frequently, causing tsunamis, tearing cities apart, and causing buildings to collapse. To mitigate damage, civil engineers find ways to use the foundation of a building to prevent collapse. This project’s objective was finding which foundation best protects buildings from collapse in an earthquake. Four foundation designs were tested: fixed base, raft, bearing base isolation, and damper base isolation. It was hypothesized the damper base isolation foundation would best prevent superstructure collapse, followed by bearing base isolation, raft, and fixed base. This experiment used a motorized shake table to stimulate movement from s-waves in earthquakes while bamboo skewers and modeling clay formed buildings. Each building had a 150-gram weight placed on it. A stopwatch was used to record the time elapsed when the superstructure collapsed. The results showed damper base isolation was, in fact, the best at preventing collapse, and fixed base was the worst. Surprisingly, there was no significant difference between results for raft and bearing base isolation foundations. Initial research showed the bearing base isolation foundation’s flexible materials should have absorbed lateral forces. A possible reason it did not perform as expected is that the foundation changed the natural frequency of the structure to be closer to the frequency of the shaking, amplifying the forces instead of absorbing them. Improvements to the experiment include more trials or testing more foundation types. Further research includes testing different speeds of shaking, weights, or materials.

Competition history

• CSEF 2026 Applied Mechanics (Junior Division) · Entry J-02-22

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