We are delighted to mark the completion of the ERIES

Anastasios Sextos

Jul 1, 2026

We are delighted to mark the completion of the ERIES: Engineering Research Infrastructures for European Synergies HYSTERESIS project — a milestone for European structural earthquake engineering research.

This is the first geographically distributed hybrid test to incorporate soil-structure interaction. Rather than testing a single specimen in a single lab, our 5-storey CLT specimen was sub-structured between locations and laboratories:

🔹 The ground-floor CLT wall, founded on compliant soil in the SoFSI soil pit and equipped with BRB hold-downs, was physically tested in Bristol, UK
🔹 Sand dampers representing the first and upper floors were tested simultaneously at STRULAB, University of Patras, Greece
🔹 The remaining structure was simulated numerically in MATLAB and OpenSeesPy, coordinated in real time from a central node in Hanze, Netherlands.

The loading protocol used a scaled record of the 1986 Kalamata earthquake at 30% and 100% intensity.

Whilst the tests showed good alignment with the numerical predictions, they also highlighted several phenomena that could not be captured by numerical analysis alone. This emphasises the importance of large-scale testing to validate numerical models, something SoFSI was designed to enable.

The project was led by Hanze, with ERIES (University of Bristol and University of Patras) beneficiaries offering Transnational Access to the international User Group: University of Toronto, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), University of Waterloo, supported by sponsors Arfen BRB Sismik Yapı Teknolojileri Ltd. Şti., and funded by the European Union through ERIES.

We are grateful to Stora Enso for their donation of the CLT panel and all the research and technical teams who brought a complex international project from idea to reality.

HYSTERESIS shows the potential of testing between distributed experimental facilities across multiple countries – it produces results that no single facility or numerical model could achieve alone.

If your research or engineering project involves soil-structure interaction or large-scale structural dynamics questions that need physical validation, we’d be happy to discuss with you.