A lick of paint could help make brick houses earthquake resistant. The paint is made with glass fibres and improves the strength of a building, as well as its flex during shakes.
Brick structures are cheap to build, but often aren鈥檛 very resistant to earthquakes. So Kenjiro Yamamoto at the University of Tokyo and colleagues created a coating to improve their resilience, consisting of standard acrylic-silicone paint resin and glass fibres.
The paint enhances the building鈥檚 overall strength, as well as its ability to dissipate energy by bending but not breaking.
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In tests, the team found that its paint allowed a quarter-scale model of a brick house to withstand shaking up to twice the intensity of the massive Kobe earthquake in Japan that occurred in 1995.
Without the coating, another model house collapsed under a much weaker shake, equivalent to a weak earthquake. The researchers will follow up with a full-scale model this summer.
There are few options available for retrofitting buildings to make them more earthquake resilient. Wall overlays made of reinforced plastic can be used but are only as strong as the glue used to affix them.
Yamamoto and his team expect the paint to cost between 拢7 to 拢14 per square metre. Other options can cost 10 times as much.
The paint should be appealing in developing countries where cost is an issue, says at the University of Auckland in New Zealand.
Additionally, a transparent version of the paint will be particularly good for historic buildings, although he is concerned about what would happen if the paint cracks.
The team is making tweaks to the resin and ratio of glass fibres to make the paint more resistant. It also plans to develop a coating for other types of buildings, such as structures made from reinforced concrete or wood. The researchers will present their work at the in Paris next month.
