Two dozen countries have experienced deadly earthquakes in the past decade. Nemkumar Banthia and his research group at the University of British Columbia, Canada, have spent several years in the lab shaking walls in ways that mimic earthquakes. As a result of that work, they have engineered a coating that they say can keep non-load-bearing masonry walls standing in earthquakes stronger than the 9.0 temblor that rattled northeastern Japan on 11 March 2011. In November they began applying their eco-friendly ductile cementitious composite (EDCC) to seismically strengthen a local Vancouver public school; next in line is a school in Roorkee, Uttarakhand, a highly seismic area of northern India.
A layer of EDCC almost doubles the amount of deformation that a masonry wall can sustain, says Salman Soleimani, who will defend his PhD thesis with Banthia in the coming weeks. The team focused on non-load-bearing walls because of both the availability...
