NEES@UNR
NEES

What is NEES...?

Equipment Sites

Equipment Site Map
(Click a red disk to select a different equipment site)
University of California, Berkeley: Reconfigurable Reaction Wall-Based Earthquake Simulator Facility University of California, Davis: Geotechnical Centrifuge (Modeling) Facility University of California, Santa Barbara: Permanently Instrumented Field Sites for Study of Soil-Foundation-Structure Interaction University of California, Los Angeles: Field Testing and Monitoring of Structural Performance University of California, San Diego: Large High Performance (LHP) Outdoor Shake Table University of Texas at Austin, Large-Scale Mobile Shakers and Associated Instrumentation for Dynamic Field Studies of Geotechnical and Structural Systems Lehigh University: Real-time Multi-directional Testing Facility for Seismic Performance Simulation of Large-Scale Structural Systems Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute: Upgrading, Development and Integration of Next Generation Earthquake Engineering Experimental Capability Cornell University: Large Displacement Soil-Structure Interaction Facility for Lifeline Systems University at Buffalo, SUNY: Versatile High Performance Shake Tables Facility towards Real-Time Hybrid Seismic Testing University of Nevada, Reno: Multiple Biaxial Shake Table Research Facility Brigham Young University: Permanently Instrumented Field Sites for Study of Soil-Foundation-Structure Interaction (at UCSB) University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign: Multi-Axial Full-scale Sub-Structuring Testing & Simulation Facility University of Colorado at Boulder: Fast Hybrid Test Platform for the Seismic Performance Evaluation of Structural Systems Oregon State University: Multidirectional Wave Basin for Remote Tsunami Research University of Minnesota, Twin Cities: A System for Multi-Axial Subassemblage Testing (MAST)

The National Science Foundation (NSF) George E. Brown, Jr. Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES) is a project funded under the NSF Major Research Equipment Program.  Congress has authorized NEES for a five-year construction period, from October 1, 1999 through September 30, 2004, for a total of $81.9 million.  The goal of NEES is to provide a national, networked collaboratory of geographically-distributed, shared-use next-generation experimental research equipment sites, with teleobservation and teleoperation capabilities, which will transform the environment for earthquake engineering research and education through collaborative and integrated experimentation, computation, theory, databases, and model-based simulation to improve the seismic design and performance of U.S. civil and mechanical infrastructure systems.  The construction period was completed on September 30, 2004, the NEES collaboratory has entered its operational period from October 1, 2004 through September 30, 2014 and will be managed by the NEES Consortium.

The NEES program will provide an unprecedented infrastructure for research and education, consisting of networked and geographically distributed resources for experimentation, computation, model-based simulation, data management, and communication. Rather than placing all of these resources at a single location, NSF has leveraged its investment and facilitated research and education integration by distributing the shared-use equipment among 15 universities throughout the US. To insure that the nation's researchers can effectively use this equipment, equipment sites will be operated as shared-use facilities, and NEES will be implemented as a network-enabled collaboratory. As such, members of the earthquake engineering community will be able to interact with one another, access unique, next generation instruments and equipment, share data and computational resources, and retrieve information from digital libraries without regard to geographical location. Currently, four major activities are being undertaken to bring NEES on line. These include constructing the shared-use Equipment Sites, developing standards and advanced networking capabilities to connect the powerful new experimental and computational resources with the earthquake engineering community as well as to the public at large, developing a community-backed research collaboratory and consortium to carryout and manage NEES activities, and identifying a research agenda that addresses high priority needs.


NEES Equipment Sites

Shake Table Research Equipment

University of Nevada, Reno
University at Buffalo, SUNY
University of California, San Diego

Centrifuge Research Equipment

University of California, Davis
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Tsumani Wave Basin

Oregon State University, Corvallis

Large Scale Lifeline Testing

Cornell University

Field Experimentation and Monitoring Installations

University of California, Los Angeles
University of Texas at Austin
University of California, Santa Barbara

Large Scale Labratory Experimentation Systems

University at Buffalo, SUNY
University of California at Berkeley
University of Colorado, Boulder
University of Minnesota-Twin Cities
Lehigh University
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign