Santa Fe High (110)

The Santa Fe High team (#110) is from Santa Fe. This year they've submitted a project titled The Effects of Earthquakes on Adobe Structures.

Proposal
http://mode.lanl.k12.nm.us/get_proposal1112.php?team_id=110

The project will analyze the structural weaknesses of New Mexico's cathedrals (or buildings which directly effect the tourist industry) in light of the recent seismic activity within the area. A model using Python will be devised to test the structures, as they exist now, against various severities of earthquakes. We will then retest the buildings with modified structural bracers and compare the durabilities. The data collected will offer possible enhancements to New Mexican achitecture in an attempt to preserve the economic values our cathedrals offer our state.

Interim Report
http://mode.lanl.k12.nm.us/get_interim1112.php?team_id=110

Our team has been busy over the past weeks researching material on our project. We plan to test the effects of earthquakes on New Mexico adobe structures and how to better build these structures to withstand an earthquake. The team has been reading in books in the public libraries and well as doing research on the internet. We have found that the adobe structure is not the weakest or the strongest when it comes to withstanding a natural disaster such as an earthquake. For this reason, we want to be able to maximize the strength of these old adobe structures to lessen the effects of an earthquake.

Our team has not run any experiments on this project as of right now. We plan to begin working with our mentors to start programming a simulation of an earthquake. From these experiments and simulations, we hope to locate the faulty areas of the adobe structure, how it compares to the brick and other building structures, and what needs to be improved on the adobe structure.

James Romero is the president of this Supercomputing Challenge team. Mark Garcia assists in the research and reporting as well. Lucas Romero is a former member of the team who, unfortunately, recently dropped out because of other conflicts. We are, however, expecting to gain another member very soon. We do not know his name at the time.

While we are still in search of a programming mentor, we do have a general seismology mentor, Ms. Charlotte Rowe. Our advisor is Ms. Anita Nugent who teaches science at Santa Fe High School.

Overall, our project is going very well and we expect to gather excessive data in the short future. Thank you for taking the time to read over this report. If anyone should have any questions we can answer, you can contact us through Ms. Anita Nugent (anugent@sfps.info). Thank you again.

Introduction
Hi,

My name is LD "Gus" Landis. See the biography on my User Page.

Progress
The research you are doing could be very helpful I am sure.

It sounds to me like you are beginning to reign in the scope of your project to evaluating the survivability of existing adobe structures to earthquakes.

I think that is a sufficient goal. That is, comparing and contrasting to structures of other materials is too much.

Mentors
Having a mentor to help you understand the forces at work in an earthquake (e.g. Ms Rowe) is great!

Since your stated goal is: "we hope to locate the faulty areas of the adobe structure", it is strongly recommended that you also find a mentor with an "engineering" background to help you understand historic/current building practices and/or materials (e.g. old versus new methods of making adobe).

Model
You didn't discuss anything about your plans for your model.

This is a complex problem (modeling motion and catastrophic non-linear failure) to model.

Perhaps reigning in the problem even more (focus on modeling an earthquake -OR- stress strength of an adobe brick made in the "traditional" and "modern" ways) would be in order.

Face to Face Evaluation
Your next milestone is a |face to face evaluation in February.

Rubrics
The judges will use these rubrics to evaluate your projects. Use them as checklists for what you need to communicate to the judges.


 * Expo Judges Rubric
 * Finalist Judges Rubric