The New Zealand Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NZNEES) now have a website http://www.nznees.auckland.ac.nz  It is still very much a work in progress and probably a couple weeks behind of where we are actually at.

There have been quite a few exciting developments at our place over the last few weeks. Quincy Ma is currently in Taiwan where the University of Auckland has been invited to join ANCER, the Asia pacific network for earthquake engineering http://mceer.buffalo.edu/research/International_Research/ANCER/  He will soon be looking to start working on collaborative projects with new South and North Asian partners.

Also in Taiwan, Quincy met with one of the principle investigators for UKNEES, (a joint project from Oxford, Cambridge and Bristol). http://gow.epsrc.ac.uk/ViewGrant.aspx?GrantRef=EP/D080088/1  

NZNEES group are planning a collaborative project on “Real Time Distributed Testing”, where parties from UK and NZ, test parts of a large civil engineering structure (perhaps NZ in the field, UK in a laboratory), and then linking the experimental data together in real time using a high speed network to simulate something much bigger.

Quincy hopes KAREN will be expanding in these regions to keep them going!

The NZNEES group have recently conducted a “rocking wall” test, U.S. participants did the numerical modelling and observed the testing in real time, unfortunately not through KAREN.

Quincy Ma, Lecturer, Dept.of Civil and Environmental Engineering

University of Auckland, New Zealand q.ma@auckland.ac.nz