Tectonic hazards/Shake-table

Educational level: this is a research resource.

Main resource: Earthquake engineering

Shake-table in earthquake engineering is a very effective experimental equipment to verify seismic performance associated with the direct damage to individual buildings or their models under specified ground shaking. The best way to do it is to put a building structure on a shake-table that simulates the earth shaking and to watch what may happen next (if you have no time to stand out in the field and wait for a real earthquake to strike). The earliest shake-table experiments were performed more than a century ago

Look up shake table in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

Modern shake-tables typically consist of a rectangular platform that is driven in up to six degrees of freedom (DOF) by servo-hydraulic or other types of actuators. Test specimens are fixed to the platform and shaken, often to the point of failure.

Concurrent performance testing

Concurrent testing on a shake-table is mostly used when some new building technology has to be compared against the old one; see, e.g., the images below:

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

Those testings might include both real (physical) and virtual (computer) experiments.

Wikibooks has a book on the topic of Seismic fitness.