In the 1995 South Hyogo Prefecture Earthquake (the Kobe Earthquake), a lot of structures, such as buildings, highways, soil and foundations, were severely damaged and such damaged structures caused more than 6,000 victims. To clarify the cause of such structural damage and then to mitigate the earthquake disaster, the Japanese government decided to construct a three-dimensional full-scale earthquake testing facility so as to obtain the real data of structural response until its failure under seismic motions. The construction of the testing facility, which is nicknamed E-Defense, was completed in March 2005.
The main equipment of E-Defense is a large shaking table. The table size is 20 meters by 15 meters in the plan, and the maximum payload that can be tested on E-Defense is 12 MN. The maximum horizontal and vertical accelerations under the maximum payload are 9 m/s² and 15 m/s², respectively. The maximum velocity and displacement in horizontal are 2 m/s and ±1 m, respectively. Utilizing this capability of E-Defense, more than 120 series of shaking table experiments were conducted since the facility started its operation.
In this paper, the overview of E-Defense and an example of its application to evaluate the seismic performance of pressurized piping system are introduced.

View full abstract

In the Oil and Gas industry, over 300,000 scans must be handled in a single mega-sized project. To reduce the workload needed for traditional film RT work, we implemented the usage of robotic digital RT (DR). As a result, work efficiency was improved because the RT exposure time for DR is shorter than that needed for film RT and the time -consuming work needed for changing, handling, and developing film was eliminated.

View full abstract