Broadband communications and faster computers are changing the way seismic engineering research is done. The combination enables simultaneous collaboration not only between individuals, but also between ever more sophisticated physical and computational experiments at simulation labs across the country. Such linking is letting researchers get closer to analyzing the complex response of systems in seismic events than ever before.
“We have very good tools for elastic or linear modeling and decent tools for mildly non-linear modeling, but the things that are difficult to handle currently in a computer are events when you have extreme loads that are fast, and when you have highly non-linear behavior,” says Clifford J. Roblee, executive director of the George E. Brown Jr. Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES), headquartered in Davis, Calif.