One sunny morning last month, an earthquake jolted northeast San Diego. Minutes later, another temblor hit, causing a 10-story wood building to sway.
The quakes, though, were triggered by a computer and the shaking was confined to a 1,000-square-foot platform on which the building — a full-size test model — stood.
The structure is the tallest ever subjected to simulated earthquakes on the world’s largest high-performance “shake table,” which uses hydraulic actuators to thrust the steel platform through six degrees of motion to replicate seismic force. The shake-table trials at a University of California at San Diego facility are part of the TallWood Project, an initiative to test the seismic resiliency of high-rise buildings made of mass timber. An engineered wood building material, mass timber is increasingly popular as a more sustainable alternative to carbon-intensive concrete and steel.