Role of Seismic Testing Facilities in Performance-Based Earthquake Engineering : Series Workshop

Nowadays research in earthquake engineering is mainly experimental and in large-scale; advanced computations are integrated with large-scale experiments, to complement them and extend their scope, even by coupling two different but simultaneous tests. Earthquake engineering cannot give answers by testing and qualifying few, small typical components or single large prototypes. Besides, the large diversity of Civil Engineering structures does not allow drawing conclusions from few tests; structures are large and their seismic response and performance cannot be meaningfully tested in an ordinary lab or in the field. So, seismic testing facilities should be much larger than in other scientific fields; their staff have to be resourceful, devising intelligent ways to carry out simultaneously different tests and advanced computations. To better serve such a mission European testing facilities and researchers in earthquake engineering have pooled their resources and activities in the framework of European project SERIES, doing together their research and jointly developing advanced testing and instrumentation techniques that maximize testing capabilities and increase the value of the tests. This volume presents the first outcomes of SERIES and its contribution towards Performance-based Earthquake Engineering, i.e. to the most important development in Earthquake Engineering of the past three decades. The concept and the methodologies for performance-based earthquake engineering have now come of age. However, they are based mainly on analytical/numerical research; large-scale seismic testing is entering the stage of late. The SERIES Workshop in Ohrid (MK) in Sept. 2010 pooled together the largest European seismic testing facilities, Europe's best experts in experimental earthquake engineering and select experts from the USA, to present recent research achievements and point to the future.Audience: This volume will be of interest to researchers, advanced practitioners and industry in structural earthquake engineering, geotechnical earthquake engineering and experimental dynamics (including seismic qualification).