STF4SW
Interactive demo · draft
Same earthquake. Two buildings.
Both towers below sit on the same ground motion. The left one is unprotected; the right one carries an STF damper that stiffens the instant the shaking turns violent. Raise the intensity and watch the gap grow.
The force–displacement loop, as it forms.
While the protected tower sways, its damper traces a force–displacement loop in real time. The area enclosed is the energy the fluid absorbs each cycle — the fatter and more tilted the loop, the more the viscosity has thickened. It follows the constitutive model the consortium implemented in WP2:
Soft when the city sleeps
Under everyday vibration the shear-thickening fluid flows freely, so the damper barely interferes with the structure.
Solid when the ground moves
As the shear rate spikes during an earthquake, the fluid jams into a near-solid state, soaking up energy and cutting the building's sway.
Illustrative single-degree-of-freedom model with a synthetic ground motion, built to convey the concept, not to report engineering results. The damper is modelled as velocity-thickening damping. Real characterization data and the seismic-analysis tools live on the project's Dissemination page.