SANTIAGO – Chile spends about one million dollars annually to mitigate the effect of frequent earthquakes in the country. Yet, the world-renowned Chilean wine industry faces an uphill economic battle when it comes to these natural disasters.
That’s why scientists at Chile’s Universidad Católica (UC) have developed technological solutions that could help the country’s wine industry by minimizing the impacts of major earthquakes. Chile’s devastating earthquake of February 27th, 2010 (8.8 degrees on the Richter scale) affected 25 percent of all wine containers in the country. This dramatic impact provoked a loss of around 125 million liters of wine, an equivalent of 12.5 percent of that year’s national production.
The UC project has produced flexible devices that can be installed in the base of containers and protect the contents from the excessive movement earthquakes cause. Developed at Universidad Católica and increasingly effective, these devices protect wine containers by absorbing the impact of earthquakes. “The idea of available innovations in the market, starting today, is that the energy of an upcoming major seismic event can be reduced and absorbed by the isolation and dissipation systems”, said José Luis Almazan, professor of Structural Engineering at UC who also leads the project.
“An important part of the work performed since 2015 is aiming to have commercially attractive devices”, he added. “The idea is that the cost of seismic protection, which is assumed only once, may average between 2 and 5% of the total investment in the container”. At this stage, researchers are confident they could scale the size and weight of the container that needs protection, and make the devices equally effective for other industrial equipment, reaching beyond the wine industry.
The project has received support from Tersainox S.A., a manufacturer of stainless steel ponds used in wine production. The company intends to build the seismic protection devices into their products from the very beginning, thus increasing durability and efficiency. In addition to commercial support, the project has also been recognized by the scientific community, as it won Universidad Católica’s Engineering Innovation Award in 2017.
Chile’s technological success in this area comes from the fact that it offers solutions that are economical and more adapted to the economies of Latin American countries. The lower prices could also help countries with limited budgets for such expenses, like Italy, Bulgaria or even China.
Editor-In-Chief Boris van der Spek is the founder of Chile Today.