Johns Hopkins earthquake engineer and cold-formed steel researcher Ben Schafer introduces the NHERI CFS10 project underway at the NHERI UC San Diego shake table facility. Tara Hutchinson, Schafer’s co-PI on the project, is a research engineer at UC San Diego. (We will meet Hutchinson in an upcoming episode.) The CFS10 shake table experiment caps off a long-term collaboration between NSF researchers and industry. The goal: to understand seismic performance of taller cold-formed steel buildings. The structure on the shake table mimics an apartment building or hotel; it exceeds current height and system limits – which will help the team understand how far engineers can go designing for CFS structural elements, subsystems, and non-structural elements, like stairs, gas lines and sprinkler systems. 

The CFS10 shake table tests are slated for early June, 2025. Follow along on the UCSD live cameras: https://nheri.ucsd.edu/live-cams