2020 E-Defense Test on Steel Hospital Building

From December 1 to 8, 2012, at E-Defense, the world’s largest seismic table test facility, we conducted seismic tests on a steel-framed hospital building to establish a method for quickly determining the functional continuity of facilities that serve as hubs for local medical care, such as base hospitals for disasters, after an earthquake. Disaster Prevention Research Institute (DPRI) has been conducting the project in collaboration with the National Research Institute for Earth Science and Disaster Prevention (NIED), as part of the “Resilience Enhancement Project Centered on the Tokyo Metropolitan Area,” a project subsidized by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT). We are conducting research to improve the preventive capability of buildings by collecting, analyzing, and analyzing data on the retention of the functions of buildings that make up a city and the margin of collapse before a building collapses. The project is supported by the Graduate School of Engineering, Kyoto University, Kyoto University Hospital, Kyoto Institute of Technology, Kyushu University, building material manufacturers, medical equipment manufacturers, medical academic associations, and others. The continuity of medical care in the event of a major earthquake was verified by inputting the near-fault earthquake ground motion (JMA Kobe NS wave) observed in the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake and the long-period earthquake ground motion (OS-2) assumed for the Nankai Trough earthquake. The experiment and press conference were introduced by many media (TV news, web news, newspapers, etc.).