BRIGHT IDEAS

How NASA accidentally found

a way to make buildings safer
during earthquakes
Margo Pierce February 22, 2016

 A new device can counteract the frequency at which a building vibrates. (AP Photo/Seth
Wenig)

NASA technologists are typically focused on making it safe for humans to

explore outer space. Now the space agency says it’s found a way to make
earthquakes safer for people on the ground.
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NASA developed a new stabilizing technology, known as the LOX Damper,
in 2013 after working on a violently shaking rocket. Testing revealed that
the Ares rocket, a crew launch vehicle, would shake so hard during ascent
that it could harm astronauts on board. So one NASA team experimented
with controlling the heaviest part of the rocket—its fuel. That got the team
thinking: If this technique worked on a rocket, why not a building?

To understand what’s so distinctive about this new technology, it’s helpful

to know that the normal approach to counteracting vibrations is to add
more weight to an object. Hundreds of buildings around the world use a
system called a tuned mass damper (TMD). A very heavy device, called a
secondary mass, is attached to a building to counteract its movements. One
of the world’s tallest skyscrapers, Taipei 101 in Taiwan, features a 730-ton
gold ball set on springs. The Comcast Center building in Philadelphia,
meanwhile, has a tank containing thousands of gallons of water. These
systems respond to movements by shifting in the opposite direction. So if
an earthquake or high winds force a skyscraper to sway to the right, the
TMD responds by swaying to the left—mitigating the motion.

But there are drawbacks to TMDs. For one thing, they’ve very expensive.
(Retro tting the Theme Building at the Los Angeles International Airport, a
historical landmark, required 600 tons of steel and cost a total of $12.3
million.) And TMDs are also very large, so that buildings that use them
“lose prime real estate,” according to Rob Berry, the NASA project manager
for the team that developed the technology.

A liquid anchor

In the case of the 650,000-pound Ares rocket, a TMD system wasn’t

practical. Adding more weight would have made it impossible to get the
rocket off the ground. Berry and his team had to get creative. They realized
that making the rocket’s fuel move in a way that counteracted the vibration
would perform the same function as adding more weight. So they identi ed
the frequency of the rocket’s vibration—then changed the liquid’s
frequency to match it.

The nal version of the LOX Damper weighed less than 100 pounds and was
installed in the rocket’s main fuel tank. This altered the fundamental
response of the rocket, resulting in 20 times less vibration. The result was a
rocket safe for humans.

The same concept can be applied to buildings, Berry explains.

“Everything with mass and stiffness has got a natural frequency, (so) a
building will want to move,” he says. “Say the building wants to move at 2.5
hertz. They’ll set that to be the frequency of the tuned mass damper. That
knocks out some of the response of the building.”

The force that causes the building to vibrate doesn’t gure into this
calculation—all that matters is the frequency of the building’s motion. To
test out the technology, the NASA team developed a new device called a
disruptive tuned mass (DTM) speci cally designed for buildings. After a test
at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, proved
successful, NASA “reached out to the architecture and engineering rms”
to tell them about the new opportunity, according to Berry.

The latest version of the device is approximately the size of coffee can. It
can be placed in a building’s swimming pool, pipes, or even a sprinkler
system. After an engineer determines the frequency at which a building
naturally begins to move in the event of an earthquake or high wind, the
DTM is set to match that frequency. This effectively ties a weight to the
building that prevents it from moving as it otherwise would, just like tying a
brick to a dog’s tail.
Current buildings can be retro tted with the equipment, and the system
can also be included in a new facility’s design. Tower B2 at Paci c Park, in
Brooklyn, New York, is the rst commercial property to have this new DTM
installed. The decision came after the engineering rm Thornton Tomasetti
made a site visit to Marshall to view the building test.

“Thornton Tomasetti saw how simple it was and how effective it was and
they went off and incorporated it into their B2 building,” says Berry.

Earthquake protection in real time

The goal for B2’s engineers is to reduce the motion of the building in high
winds. But if the building owners decide they want the structure to be even
more stable and withstand earthquake, they can adjust the frequency to
which the DTM is set.

Installing the NASA technology also means that buildings will be able resist
movement from the instant an earthquake strikes. With a traditional TMD,
the building would bear the full force of movement for the four or ve
seconds it takes for the secondary mass to be set in motion. That can be a
destructive few seconds.

There’s still no way to ward off earthquakes. But it’s clear that we can do
more to protect buildings from shifting of tectonic plates beneath the
Earth’s crust. Thanks to NASA, engineers now have one more good option.

We welcome your comments at ideas@qz.com.