Making buildings safer by focusing on why they can fall — over time
The recent collapse of the condo building in Florida served as a dire warning for the nation’s aging infrastructure problem and the deadly consequences that can result. Sarah Orton at the University of Missouri is working to learn more about why buildings fall and how to prevent disastrous collapses from occurring. Now, she’s looking into how the influence of time can contribute to a building’s collapse, using a more than $200,000 grant from the National Science Foundation.
“Concrete has a time dependent effect,” said Orton, who is an associate professor in the Civil and Engineering Department. “The strength of concrete under a high load for a long period of time is less than that under a short period. Here, we’re trying to understand how time contributes, and once we get that figured out, we can start looking at other things, such as corrosion, to really understand the overall life span of a structure.”