Thursday, July 16, 2009

'Invisible' Building Design Could Reduce Earthquake Damage



Recently, physicists have been developing better and better invisibility cloaks, which hide an object from sight by causing incoming light waves to bend around the object, and come together behind the object. Physicists Mohamed Farhat and Stefan Enoch of the Fresnel Institute in Marseille, France, and Sebastien Guenneau of Liverpool University in England wondered if they could use the same principles to hide an object from the destructive waves produced during an earthquake. In a paper to be published this week in the journal Physical Review Letters, the three physicists show that the answer may be "yes."

Guenneau said that it's possible to shield an object, even a building, so that an incoming earthquake wave behaves as if the object weren't there. The building in the path of the wave is like a rock in a fast-flowing river, he said.


A series of concrete rings would surround a building or other structure, forming the shield. The shield would redirect the vibration around the object inside. "Each ring is going to wobble in such a way that the wave will bend around (the object)," Guenneau said.

Earthquake waves come in varying lengths, with many peaks and troughs in a given distance, or just a few. To effectively shield a building from short and long waves that earthquakes generate, several rings could be built around a structure, each "tuned" to a different wavelength.

A 1,000 square foot house, for example, would need a circular shield with a 33-foot radius, which could be built with commercially available concrete. Guenneau suggested that the method might be used to protect a large building like a stadium, where people could seek shelter after an earthquake and be protected by the rings from possible aftershocks.

Guenneau warned that there are some limits to what the cloak can accomplish. He and his colleagues could not find a way to shield a structure from the types of earthquake waves that travel below the earth’s surface. He noted that surface waves are typically the most destructive in an earthquake.

Jim Beck, an earthquake engineering expert at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, wondered if the ring would be worth building if it couldn't protect a structure from different types of shaking, not just different wavelengths. The cloak might only work perfectly in special circumstances, he said.

"It sounds like an interesting idea, but I think there's a long way to go before they get to what they would like to see done," he said.

Guenneau said he hopes that others will take the idea and explore its promising applications. Last year, Guenneau and his colleagues made headlines by building a prototype tsunami invisibility cloak that uses ring-shaped channels to redirect water waves around an object. Now they're probing that idea further in a large-scale experiment.

The reality of making buildings seem invisible to the destructive forces of nature, be they the waves from earthquakes or tsunamis, "seems a bit crazy, but it's not science fiction," Guenneau said. "We gave the people the concept, now people can try to improve it to make it more tractable."

By Lauren Schenkman
for Inside Science News Service


  1. Ok. So next, Tornado shields.

  2. @Anonymous I believe those are called basements.

  3. okay so next lets make a boat hull invisible to the ocean waves so we can make boats faster and more enerty efficent.

    that would be sweet

  4. > okay so next lets make a boat hull invisible to the
    > ocean waves so we can make boats faster and more enerty
    > efficent.

    Yes the boat would be efficient... but moving that wave shield on the other hand... concentric rings submerged under water?

    "We have virtually eliminated the wind resistance that was sapping gas miliage from cars"
    "How do you do that?"
    "We put several concentric concrete rings around the car"
    "Whats the gas miliage now?"
    "It was 20 miles per gallon, now its 20 gallons per mile"
    "We can call it the Saudi Expedition"