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Engineering for Earthquakes

In the drive to encourage a commercial return from scientific research, more and more Crown Research Institutes are helping to establish companies that can take the results of that research and develop products and services that can compete in the marketplace. Penguin Engineering Ltd is one such spin-off, formed from the Materials Engineering Team at CRI Industrial Research Ltd.

Three years ago the Petone-based team took over the institute's research contract in the area of earthquake damping, and it now undertakes its own research on behalf of IRL and the Institute of Geological and Nuclear Sciences Ltd. IRL continues to hold the intellectual property rights to much of the leading technology developed in this area, but Penguin Engineering is using that knowledge to develop applications for an international market.

"It makes a difference to know that what you're beating your head against is going to make a personal difference to you," Penguin's research engineer Michael Monti says of the change from working in a government operation to a private company. He sees the change as providing a certain amount of freedom to exploit ideas yet retains the traditional "public good" science view concerning the need to communicate those ideas.

"We are doing good research in New Zealand and should be concentrating on communicating the information to the people who can use it."

Much of the research results that the company is using is now out of the patent period, with the initial principles having been developed 35 years ago. Penguin Engineering Ltd itself hearkens back to that time, the company name having been chosen, in part, to reflect the initials of the Physics and Engineering Lab unit of the DSIR which began this work.

Monti sees his role as communicating the value of that work to those areas where it is needed, such as Southeast Asia and China. The region is prone to large earthquakes causing massive loss of life, much of which could be preventable if suitable technology was made available.

The initial focus has been on the earthquake engineering techniques that reduce the amount of damage which results from major shakes. While the company continues to study different methods related to that, they have found their work applicable in a number of new areas.

"We've had quite a lot of interest from places we hadn't expected," says Monti. The earthquake damage research led to new techniques to treat materials so that they don't respond to vibration, which garnered interest not only from the construction industry but also from the oil and telecommunications industries.

"There was flow-on work associated with high wind protection for very tall building structures."

A Technology New Zealand funded project saw the development of a material coating damper which, when used to coat structural components, could increase the damping by 10 to 30 times. The need for further development prevented its use in the Sky Tower, despite strong interest from the Beca Carter construction engineers, but it is now being considered for use in a high tower in Macau, where the wind loading is some three times higher than that experienced in Auckland.

"We could solve both the earthquake problems and the wind problem at the same time."

The oil industry was interested in increasing the fatigue life of their structures, such as oil rigs. Expanding the operational lifetime of such a structure, even if on a small scale, can mean major savings in terms of maintenance and replacement costs. The increase in useful life is not necessarily an insignificant one, as Monti notes that their treatment process can increase the life of a cellphone repeater tower 10 times.

"Do we want it around 150 years from now though?" he laughs. We may not have the cellphone technology with us that long, but we can be assured that structures using New Zealand-developed technology will be with us then.

Engineering  for Earthquakes Figure A (23KB)
Michael Monti(L) and NZCE student Barnaby Parkin. Monti is holding one of the lead and rubber bearings of the type used to stabilise Te Papa, Parliament, and a whole host of buildings and bridges in New Zealand and around the world.

Vicki Hyde is the editor of New Zealand Science Monthly.