ABSTRACT
The UK-NEES project funded by EPSRC, UK (Grant No: EP/D079691/1), was developed initially to link the dynamic testing facilities at the Schofield Centre in University of Cambridge to the Structures Testing Laboratory at University of Oxford and the Bristol Laboratory for Advanced Dynamics Engineering (BLADE). Each of these centres also had a collaborating international partner from the USA. The Cambridge group was linked to the centrifuge centre at University of California, Davis, the Oxford group with University of California, Berkeley and the Bristol group with the large shaking table facility at SUNY-Buffalo. During the project the opportunity arose to collaborate with the New Zealand NEES facility in Auckland. The aim of the project was firstly to develop teleparticipation capabilities by building on the developments already achieved by the USA-NEES project. In addition to this, the UK-NEES project also aimed at developing a distributed hybrid testing network that could be used to conduct specialist experiments/analyses at different locations but linked together in real time using web-based communications. In this paper the results from the early attempts of distributed hybrid testing between Cambridge, Oxford and Bristol are presented.
