Saevfors Consulting 2026

Use of tires as shock absorbers?

Worn out tires can be used in house foundations to work as low cost base isolators and provide shock absorption in earth quakes. Used tires don’t have much value in the informal sector and are usually dumped in the open. There they enable mosquito breeding with subsequent malaria, dengue and zika risks. Consequently environmental synergy effects can be achieved if used tires can be recycled in common house construction. In practically all harbors you can see old tires hanging on the quay sides as fenders to mitigate the shock if a ship hits the dockside.

In races, piles of tires are protecting spectators from crashing vehicles.

When blasting rocks in open air, mat assemblies of cut tires are used to protect against undesired destruction effects.

Elephant Foot prototype

The Elephant Foot

The concept is based on low cost construction techniques: old and worn out steel belted tires plus small quantities of concrete. In the bottom of the foundation ditches round river stones are placed to work as roller bearings. The tires are then placed side by side (without filling) to provide the elastic shock absorbing response. The Elephant Foot made of regular concrete is merged into the foundation tie beam via protruding reinforcement bars. The cone shaped bottom will make the structure center back into the tires after the quake.

Seismic shake table test, India

The concluding shake table tests February 2016 at the Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati have been evaluated by Prof James Kelly, Dept of Civil Engineering, UC Berkeley.

Shake table test IIT Guwahati, India Evaluation UC Berkeley

Live test in Haiti

We built a solid wooden frame to keep the tires in place on a truck. The concrete weight was a road separation block weighing over 1.1 ton, which corresponds to a house wall on top of three tires in a row. The immediate evaluation of this first test series studying the video recordings: The concrete block was gently moving on top of the tires whereas the flatbed truck was shaking as expected on the unpaved road.
Important to note: the tires were not at all flattened by the weight of the concrete block, the three tires sustained easily 1.1+ ton, which corresponds well to the typical concrete hollow block house as can be seen in most low-income urban areas all over the world.

Test in Haiti 2014...

Watch Youtube:
http://youtu.be/qvvUfwdXndo