October 2009 | Wall: More Light (But still strong) = More earthquake resistant

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Wall: More Light

(But Still Strong) = More Earthquake Resistant

Earthquake is a natural phenomenon that often occurs in Indonesia, because in general areas of Indonesia have high levels of volcanic activity is very high, and also has a base layer of soil sufficient to trigger the earthquake-prone tectonics.

According Subandono Diposaptono, a researcher from the Department of Fisheries and Maritime Affairs, every month an average of 300-450 times of earthquakes in Indonesia. Fortunately, the earthquake that happened was a small-scale earthquake. Volcanic and tectonic earthquake on a small scale does not significantly affect the structure of surrounding buildings.

But sometimes occur in large-scale earthquake that caused a lot of destroyed buildings razed to the ground and caused many casualties. Recently, a fairly large quake measuring magnitude 7.6 occurred on Wednesday, September 30, 2009, at 17:16 pm, with a depth of 110 km in West Sumatra. Own epicenter located at 22 km southwest of Pariaman. Also Java tectonic earthquake that occurred at some time ago on September 2, 2009 centered at 142 km southwest of Tasikmalaya SR 7.3 scale.

Basically, inhabited buildings are damaged or destroyed due to building structures that are not quite light and do not have a level of unity (monolith) is sufficient.

A. Principles of Earthquake Resistant Buildings

1. Plan a simple and symmetrical
Investigation of damage caused by the earthquake showed the importance of building a simple layout and structural elements resisting horizontal forces are symmetrical. Such structures can better withstand earthquake forces because of the lack of effect of torque and power are more evenly.

2. Building materials should be as light as possible
Due to the limited choice of building materials, the designers of the building using conventional building materials are generally heavy, but it would be better if using lightweight construction materials. This is because the magnitude quake inertial load is proportional to the weight of building materials.

For example roofing tiles on wooden horses produce horizontal seismic force of 3x earthquake load generated by the aluminum zinc roofing on wooden horses. Similarly, the pair produce seismic brick wall that is much larger than the wall using lightweight materials.

3. Institute of buildings should form a solid unity
If we look at the condition of the conventional post-quake building, there are still many visible condition of the walls in buildings separate from the column. This shows that the more monolithic (single unit), a wall will minimize the collapse of the effects of the earthquake. Construction of the wall / building that is not monolithic (eg red brick, brick light) will tend to have trouble cracking the total collapse even when a large magnitude earthquake occurs.

As with the pattern of wall that have a unity between the walls of the column. This will make the building into a single unit (boxed effect).

The existence of additional reinforcement or reinforcement (eg by pembesian wiremesh), it is helpful to form a unified whole building.

With the additional reinforcement of this, if shocks though, likely will experience the rift wall, but avoid total collapse (catastrophic failure).

4. The need for load restraint system of adequate construction
In order for a building to withstand earthquakes, seismic inertial forces should be channeled from every element of the structure to the main structure of the horizontal force. Then move these forces to the foundation and the ground. It will be very important if the main structure of the horizontal force resisting it is elastic. Because if the elastic force is exceeded, brittle failure that suddenly will not happen, but in certain places will be seen the pattern of cracks / deflection first.

b-panel^® wall is a concept of new building materials developed by PT. BETON ELEMENINDO PUTRA in construction in Indonesia, with a sandwich wall panel system made of material (b-foam^®) which is very light, lined with high quality wiremesh (U-50), wrapped in high strength concrete plaster (K-225) and serves as a wall of earthquake-resistant structure (load bearing wall), so having a lightweight structure, but also sturdy.

One of the advantages of b-panel^® is to have a lighter weight compared to the wall with conventional methods. And also has a pattern of monolithic wall that is connected between the wall of the one with the other walls have wiremesh functioning due to tightly bind to each other.

b-panel^® system not only for structural wall applications only, but also can be applied to the floor, no roof and the stairs to the characteristics of the insulation (thermal / acoustic) and excellent earthquake resistance.

B. Wall Materials b-panel^®
b-panel^® wall is a type of sandwich wall panels (wall-coated material), which consists of 3 materials:

- b-foam^®: a material made from polystyrene with a minimum density of 12 kg/m3.
- High quality steel (wiremesh): a special design coupled with a diameter of 3 mm (quality U-50).
- Shotcrete concrete Plaster: Plaster with shotcrete useful way to wrap wiremesh thus forming the concrete wall structure with a thickness of 3 cm on both sides (the quality of K-225).

Source: Properti.biz October 2009 [ PDF ]

Reference Article: Newspaper “POSMETRO PADANG” May 16, 2010: “b-panel: Earthquake Safe Construction System“