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IPFS News Link • Japan - Earthquake Tsunami Radiation

Japanese Home-Levitation System Could Protect Buildings From Earthquakes

• Rebecca Boyle via PopSci.com
 

Instead of building super-strong yet flexible structures to withstand earthquakes, what if you built your house to levitate on a cushion of air? This is already being employed in Japan, a little less than a year after the massive earthquake and tsunami that devastated the country.

The levitation system is the brainchild of a company called Air Danshin Systems Inc., which the Japanese-culture-and-art site Spoon & Tamago says roughly translates to “anti-seismic.” It was founded in 2005 but has caught on after the March 11, 2011 Tohoku earthquake.

It consists of a sensor network, an air compressor and an artificial second foundation beneath the home’s bottom level and just above the ground. An earthquake-sensitive motion sensor recognizes when the earth is unstable, and an air compressor activates within half a second to fill the space between the building and the ground. It can lift a structure 1.2 inches off the ground, according to a report in DigitalTrends.

2 Comments in Response to

Comment by bayag
Entered on:

 

Escape disaster through the air is a novel idea. Terrorists practice this idea long before the Japanese began to even think about it. Airy government haters, whose feet do not touch the ground, attack and kill. Most of them escape the death penalty by claiming insanity.

 

Clearly, the safest place in murder is when the mind is in the air. Although in prison for life, Charles Manson who claims he floats in the air, is still alive. Ask someone who sounds familiar. He knows how this works.

Comment by Powell Gammill
Entered on:

Clearly the safest place to be in an earthquake is in the air.

But, I wonder if the woman's platform shown in the video was already on an air layer and not the "1/2 second after initiation of" the rocking.

I would be concerned with a few things: 1.  The air compressor must be attached to the house, not the ground.  It must survive the fraction of a second rocking before the house lifts off the ground.  2. It must run on a battery power since utility supplied power may fail during the earthquake.  3.  While half a second to detect and respond to an earthquake is realistic, I am not sure how long it would take to lift a house on a cushion of air.  That is a lot of rocking in between the system must survive.  4.  Lastly, how well will it work over a liquifactional surface during the earthquake?  Can it actually push against such a phenomenon?  And do cracks opening and closing below the house present another problematic phenomenon?


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