Understanding the bigger picture

Dr Bill Robinson of Robinson Seismic, the inventor of the lead rubber bearing, explains how his understanding of earthquakes has helped him develop his base isolation system. He describes some of the factors that need to be considered when isolating a structure.

Transcript

DR BILL ROBINSON The Nobel Laureate Fineman said what he does is he brings, his ignorance to a problem, and that is what I do; I bring my ignorance to a problem. I understand but I am not an expert in details of earthquakes. And what I've done is I try and go back to square one and come up with a solution. So it’s important to understand basic principals.

All I need to know is what sort of forces, what sort of accelerations the earthquake will produce and then the engineers to tell me what sort of displacements the seismic isolation system needs to go, and that is it. So what we need to do is understand what force and what displacement.

Acknowledgements: Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa