A
Whole Lot of Shakin' Goin' On
Looking at How Wine Barrels Stack Up in an Earthquake
By
Teresa Mariani Hendrix
In
one of the newest spaces in the Advanced Technology
Laboratories on campus, a professor and a team
of students are blending winemaking, engineering
and earthquakes.
It
may sound like an odd mix, but in fact it’s
a research project with plenty of punch.
Structural
engineering Professor Charles Chadwell is looking
for ways to prevent wine barrels from toppling
and breaking during an earthquake. Standard
industry practice in California is to age wines
in oak barrels stacked on portable metal racks,
Chadwell explains.
Wineries commonly stack the barrels five, six,
seven – even eight high.
It’s a tradition that may work fine in
France – but it doesn’t always work
well in earthquake country.
Many
Paso Robles-area wineries found that out Dec.
22, 2003, during the 6.5 San Simeon earthquake.
Wine barrels shook, rattled, rolled and fell
all over San Luis Obispo County, particularly
in areas closest to the epicenter. Thousands
of gallons of wine spilled from broken barrels,
causing hundreds of thousands of dollars in
loss and damages. At Wild Horse Winery, a worker
was buried under a pile of fallen wine barrels.
She was rescued after crews drained the barrels
and rolled them off.
Just
two days before the quake, Chadwell had submitted
a grant proposal for a wine barrel earthquake
research project. The project was quickly granted
$40,000 from Cal Poly’s C3RP technology
park research program for junior faculty. In
addition to the grant, Mondavi wineries donated
wine barrels, and storage-rack maker Topco Inc.
donated portable steel wine barrel racks.
The
new wine barrel lab at the ATL is equipped with
a “shake table” and a hydraulic
lift, along with sophisticated computer equipment.
The setup recreates movement from actual earthquakes,
including the 1994 Northridge earthquake.
Chadwell and engineering students Jeremy Stanley,
Mark Philipps and Townsend Brown have been stacking
600-lb. wine barrels filled with water two,
three and four rows high, recreating quakes,
and recording what happens. They’re working
their way up to a five-barrel tower test.
The
goal of the research project, Chadwell says,
is to come up with a mathematical formula and
model for winery earthquake loss estimations.
“For a particular winery, if we know the
kind of soil the winery is on, the distance
to the closest earthquake fault, and the maximum
earthquake that fault can produce, we can use
the model to assess the monetary risk of an
earthquake,” he explains.
Wineries
could then contrast the risk against the cost
of modifying their wine barrel storage.
With
the data they’ve gathered so far, the
professor and his students have come up with
new ideas on how to make stacks of wine barrels
safer during earthquakes. They’re seeking
a patent on one of them. Chadwell and the College
of Engineering are planning to invite winery
owners from the Central Coast and Napa and Sonoma
counties to the lab this spring for a demonstration
– and some wine and Cal Poly cheese.
For
Chadwell and the students, the project is a
chance to come up with a solution to a real-world
problem. “We were looking for a project
that would benefit industry, and with Cal Poly’s
location in wine country, this was just a natural,”
Chadwell says.
And
besides, as a cabernet sauvignon fan, “I
hate to see a good barrel of wine go to waste.”