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Cars have been used to do many wonderful things, but sometimes using them can still be surprising. For example, this truck is designed less to move people than to move the ground.
Affectionately called the T-Rex by the University of Texas team that operates it, the Large Mobile Shaker, to use its real name, is a big old truck that can deliver up to 27 tons of force to the ground at 30 times a second. .
According to Tom Scott, who filmed the T-Rex in action, at lower settings it feels like a small earthquake moving the ground beneath your feet, making everything feel a little uneven. That is only at the highest level that they are allowed to use it on campus.
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According to Ken Stokoe, a professor at the University of Texas, the T-Rex was once accidentally placed a little too high on the UCLA campus, and the impact on the ground was so powerful that students ended up running out of a nearby building in fright. “That got us in trouble,” Stokoe says.
The T-Rex is named after the Jurassic Park scene where the steps of a tyrannosaurus rex’s approach can be seen in the ripples in a water glass. The T-Rex is designed to shake the ground in much the same way. It is used to find out how well the earth can withstand an earthquake in a particular place. This is useful when buildings are being built.
In addition to the tedder, the machine can also bury sensors under the ground to measure how force waves propagate through the ground. That’s hugely important for buildings like power plants, for which earthquake design is critical.
“We were able to evaluate the stiffness profile down to half a mile without drilling holes,” Stokoe said. “That’s really an achievement and a very, very complement to the addition of the plant’s design.”
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