In May 25th, 2015, professor Akira Wada, from Tokyo Institute of Technology visited and kindly gave a lecture in UTCB.
The summary of the lecture is:
“A human life is around 80 years. Building life is only about 40 years in Japan. A life of a city has to be more than several hundred years and forever. A big earthquake will attack the city in every hundred years or more year interval. In general, people are optimistic. They want to believe next big earthquake will not come while they live. Then, people did not want to make building structures enough strength against expected big earthquakes. They allow that structures will have severe damages as large plastic deformations of building frames under big earthquakes and they accept that these buildings cannot be used after the big earthquakes.
When we want to make safe and resilient city to the next big earthquake and want to have the business continuity of the city and country, we have to make buildings having high seismic performance structures than before. We are in the 21-Century, advanced technologies such as seismic isolated or damage controlled structures become reliable and cheaper than before and we can apply these technologies to many kinds of buildings now. The next important step is to select and to use good structures for people.”
After his excellent lecture, we had a young researcher workshop, and Dr. Andreea Dutu, Dr. Dietlinde Kober and Dr. Florin Pavel presented their research to prof. Akira Wada, and he kindly advised us on our findings and future research directions.
Prof. Akira Wada always teaches the young researchers, even on the steps of our university.
