"Mesa Vibratoria" Will Help Prepare Future Peruvian Engineers

Located along the South American west coast and circumscribed by the Andean mountains on the east, Peru is a nation that experiences high seismic activity. For this reason, seismic resistant structures are paramount for Peruvians. Consequently, their civil engineers have accepted the challenge imposed by Mother Nature and therefore universities and research centers are preparing future engineers with the latest technologies for this purpose. The most recent acquisition of Universidad Federico Villarreal in Lima, Peru for the Civil Engineering Faculty has been the Quanser Shake Table II, so their students can run simulations of actual earthquakes.

I had the privilege of traveling to Peru for an on-site installation and training on the "mesa vibratoria" at the university, where I met Professor Omart Tello and his students. Professor Tello teaches Seismic Resistance Engineering to Civil Engineering students in their final year. It was clear that these students were very excited and motivated to learn how to operate the Shake Table II system. On the fist day of training, they quickly learned to set up and run the experiments using the two distinct methods: using the Graphical User Interface that Quanser provides for running Shake Table II experiments, and using QUARC/Simulink models. In the following day, the training was focused on recording results for further analysis and downloading and running other earthquake files from the PEER Strong Motion database.

Professor Tello (second from the left) and his team have many plans for using
the Quanser Shake Table II for teaching, as well as research.

Professor Tello plans to use the Shake Table II in various projects the students are working on, one of them being the development of a seismic isolator. Their projects include the addition of the Quanser Active Mass Damper (AMD) to the system. I'm confident that with this new resource for the Civil Engineering labs, students at Universidad Federico Villarreal will further expand their knowledge and research capabilities.