Earthquake Resilient Water Pipe

Designing for green and sustainability will be a must this century.  Designing for resiliency is in its infancy - - look for resilient design (the ability for systems and communities to absorb a shock and then bounce back) to become a huge opportunity and market.

 

 

More here and from the introduction to the article:

 

Water pipes that bend and move rather than rupture and break in an earthquake could soon become commonplace after the most recent disaster in Christchurch, New Zealand, demonstrated that the innovative technique could be successful.

 

Underground pipelines are a lifeline when disaster strikes, especially in earthquakes, and so Cornell University professor Thomas O’Rourke set about finding a resilient alternative.

 

O’Rourke carried out research at the George E Brown Jr. Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES) with colleagues from Cornell and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI).

 

Funded by National Science Foundation, NEES is a 14-site distributed shared-use laboratory of earthquake engineering equipment interconnected by a cyber-infrastructure, managed by Purdue University. NEES provides researchers with access to laboratories, computing and collaboration tools and to a curated central data repository for all data generated from NEES research. Researchers can execute experiments that were not possible before, conduct computer simulations at U.S. supercomputing centres, measure the results and share them in real time.