Design Study of a European Facility for Advanced Seismic Testing (E-FAST)

Framework: FP7 — Capacities
Programme: Research Infrastructures
Destination: Support to new research infrastructures
Action type: Collaborative project
Countries involved: France,Romania,Italy,Germany,European organisations area
Call:  (FP7-INFRASTRUCTURES-2007-1, 2007)
Start date: 2008-09-01
End date: 2011-08-31
Duration (months): 36.0
Total project cost (EUR): 3197771.4
EU funding (EUR): 2600000.0
Participants: 5
Project status: CLOSED

Earthquakes regularly occur throughout the world, frequently causing catastrophic harm and injury and always resulting in significant damage and widespread disorganization in the area. Modern society is increasingly vulnerable to external hazards, it is readily apparent that, in developed countries, although the numbers of victims of major earthquakes is tending to drop, the costs of the consequences are constantly rising. It is therefore indispensable for Europe to intensify the research and development in this field. Main topics of this research and development aim to improve the capability of prediction of the behavior of new or existing structures and equipment, define reliable and economic ways of retrofit. The strong R&D need in earthquake engineering must be accompanied by an in-depth consideration of research infrastructures. For the design study of a world class seismic testing facility, the work plan should be brought following this coherent set of objectives: • Define the new testing facility, high performances, single-site, answering to modularity, flexibility, operating easiness, complementary to existing research infrastructures in Europe; • Develop a new level of infrastructures consisting of creating the most advanced European infrastructure facilitating the networking with other European laboratories, which imply possible upgrade of existing testing facilities to meet new requirements to perform distributed tests; • Be a catalyst and play a drive role at the European level as a research instrument of reference and permit a harmonious development of earthquake engineering scientific community, around it; • Make progress, in coupling, of numerical tools for simulation and advanced test methodology; • Address and answer to the key questions concerning the assessment of the technical and financial feasibility of E-FAST, leading to a "conceptual design report" allowing policy makers to prepare relevant strategic decisions for the development of a comprehensive and highly effective network of research infrastructures of excellence in Europe, in the field of earthquake engineering E-FAST, the new testing facility, single-site, will answer to criteria as modularity, flexibility, operating easiness, and connected by the network to existing research infrastructures in Europe. Main ideas support the design of E-FAST: • The need of facilities with high performances in term of payload, velocities, displacement, acceleration, control… The objective is to be able to represent any significant input signal, to conduct tests until failure, to simulate all the possible failure modes (inertial and relative displacement)…; • The capacity to have a great flexibility and versatility for testing. This imply optimized layout around shaking tables, reaction wall, possibility of constructing specimen, handling mock-up, and consideration of multiple tables; • Testing and simulation are interdependent. Hybrid testing is one key element of the future facility; Inclusion of finite element calculation in real time in the control loop will permit to simulate the behavior of virtual part of specimens. Another important key step is distributed testing, where different parts of the model are tested and/or simulated on different facilities, with a coupled response; • The strong integration of different facilities within networks; this will allow sharing of data, distributed testing, optimization of test programs, and enhanced cooperation between partners…; • Improved access and knowledge dissemination, either for physical presence at the facility or with telepresence. Access will be facilitated. Five organisations in Europe are involved in this preliminary design of E-FAST, coordinated by CEA: CEA (F), ¨Gh.Asachi¨ Technical University of Iasi (Ro), Eucentre (I), Kassel University (D) and JRC-IPSC (EC). Above organizations have a wide experience in Earthquake Engineering, in operation of test laboratory (JRC

Keywords: research infrastructure,building environment,earthquake engineering & testing,future esfri roadmap,training,simulation,enhancement of access to research infrastructures