HOW A TORONTO STARTUP IS WORKING TO KEEP BUILDINGS SAFER DURING EARTHQUAKES.
As if to remind us of its destructive power, the teutonic plates beneath the earth again shifted. Japan was the first to be hit. Still recovering from the massive 2011 earthquake and tsunami, back to back earthquakes struck in the south on April 14 and 15, registering a 6.2 and 7 magnitude, respectively. A day later, Ecuador was struck by a 7.8- magnitude quake, killing more than 500 people.
These quakes came days before the one year anniversary of the worst earthquake to hit Nepal in generations. The 7.8 magnitude quake that hit Kathmandu on April 25, 2015 was followed 17 days later by another of almost equal magnitude. The cost was massive: 8,617 lost their lives, 2.8 million people were displaced, 26 hospitals were damaged and 473,000 homes destroyed, the United Nations reports. The estimated cost to rebuild is pegged at US$5 billion.
One Toronto-based startup has been working for 15 years on technology designed to earthquake- and windproof highrise buildings. Kinetica’s Viscoelastic Coupling Damper ( VCD) will first be used in the YC Condos development underway in downtown Toronto.
“Right now, buildings in Canada are designed to ride out an earthquake. This means they are designed and built to remain standing. That’s what the building code requires,” said Michael Montgomery, Kinetica’s chief executive, who founded the company with University of Toronto professor Constantin Christopoulos.
“Even though a building remains standing, you can still have distributed architectural damage throughout. Our technology reduces that damage through the use of strategically placed dampers that mitigate wind- induced vibrations and enhance the building’s seismic response,” Montgomery said.
Deepak Pant, a structural engineer and researcher, joined Kinetica because of that technology. Pant, born in Nepal, is all too familiar with the devastation earthquakes cause. His family survived the quake in Nepal last year, although his sister was forced from her home in Kathmandu, and Pant was studying for his PhD in Tokyo when the magnitude 9 earthquake hit northeastern Japan five years ago.
“I was excited about the technology and the impact it can have, particularly given the growth in highrise buildings,” Pant said.
There is some urgency to getting the technology to market. Pant cites a report by the U. S. Green Building Council that expects the severity of windstorms and other natural hazards to worsen in the coming years as a result of climate change.
The VCDs are the product of a collaboration between the University of Toronto and a Toronto-based engineering firm and was facilitated and partially funded by Mitacs, a national not- for- profit organization with a mandate of building research-based partnerships.
“It’s a great example of industry and academia coming together to achieve an important breakthrough in our field,” said Tibor Kokai, lead structural engineer of YC Condos, and principal of Read Jones Christoffersen Engineers.
In many ways, it represents exactly the kind of collaboration the Liberal gov- ernment is trying to foster with its innovation agenda and its $ 800 million investment, to be used over four years to support innovation clusters and networks.
Supporting innovation is one thing, but commercializing those innovations has long been an area where Canada has struggled. With the YC Condo development and its recent distribution agreement with Shanghai Lead Dynamic Engineering Inc., Kinetica has turned research into an in- demand product.
“From my experience, commercializing academic innovation leads to a much more innovative and competitive Canadian economy,” Prof. Christopoulos said.
“Canadians can directly benefit from these inventions. For example, in our case, leading to safer and more resilient infrastructure while giving Canadian companies an edge on the international stage where they can offer those new technologies and increase their competitiveness all over the world.”
Kinetica took a material first developed by 3M in 1969 and used in buildings across North America and lower rise buildings in Asia, and reconfigured it for use in tall buildings constructed from reinforced concrete. VCD is made up of layers of rubberlike material bonded between steel plates and used to join l arge concrete walls, replacing traditional concrete and steel coupling beams.
“Our hypothesis at the beginning was, since these beams are so important, why don’t we stick something in there that is much higher performing,” Montgomery said.
“We place the dampers in strategic locations in the building where they can act like shock absorbers in a car and provide a more dynamic response to wind or earthquake vibrations.”
In addition to being the only known system that works efficiently for both wind and earthquake loads, Kinetica’s technology doesn’t take up real estate in a building, as many of the alternative solutions do, YC Condo’s Kokai said.
“It fits seamlessly with the architecture and/or structure of the building.”
The VCDs for the YC Condos development will be installed in 2017, and the building is scheduled to be completed by 2018.
“People are looking for good engineering solutions to a growing problem,” Montgomery said. “We can be part of global projects, locally. It’s exciting.”