2016 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Bench-scale shake tables are an engaging tool to conduct hands-on experiments for educating students about the importance of earthquake engineering by demonstrating how structures respond to earthquake ground motions. Through these hands-on experiments, students may easily build or modify scaled structural models to test theories and implement their own innovations to examine how these structures behave. A collaborative effort was initiated by Prof. Shirley Dyke to establish the University of Consortium of Instruction Shake Table (UCIST) which endeavored to enhance the education of students through the procurement of instructional bench-scale shake tables, the development of curricula, and the dissemination of these tools to other institutions. Partnered with a former NSF-sponsored premier cyberenvironment project, the George E. Brown Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES), UCIST developed a shake table laboratory, which allows the remote control and participation of the shake table for hands-on experiments. In this study, a modified version of the remote shake table laboratory which has adopted the more widely used Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) as the communication protocol is developed. The modification allows a much more user-friendly set up process and opens up opportunities to connect the shake tables with modern mobile devices such as smartphones, tablets and wearable devices for potential control and participation of the shake table experiments. Thanks to the versatility of the TCP/IP, a mobile remote shake table laboratory is further proposed to meet the learning styles of the new generation. In this paper, the developed interactive remote shake table laboratories will be discussed in detail and a corresponding teaching module for the proposed mobile shake table laboratory is demonstrated.