We are delighted to present the ongoing research activities within QuakeCoRE, a recently inaugurated Centre of Research Excellence (http://www.quakecore.nz/). QuakeCoRE is a national network of leading New Zealand Earthquake Resilience Researchers. Clearly, geotechnical hazards play an important role in the earthquake resilience, and hence the research on seismic geotechnical hazards represents a key component of the Quake CoRE activities.
The QuakeCoRE research is organised into Technology Platforms, Research Themes and Flagship Programmes. There are six flagship programmes covering a wide range of topics across earthquake engineering and resilience science, from strong ground motions, geotechnical hazards, earthquake prone buildings, and next-generation infrastructure to societal resilience. The QuakeCoRE Flagship Programme 2 (Liquefaction Impacts on Infrastructure) focuses on soil liquefaction as one of the principal earthquake hazards affecting land and infrastructure of New Zealand. In this flagship programme, three thrust areas of research have been targeted in our initial research efforts: (i) advancement of liquefaction evaluation (beyond current state-of-practice) related to liquefaction triggering and its consequences; (ii) characterisation of cyclic behaviour and associated liquefaction vulnerability of specific New Zealand soils, and (iii) systems approach in liquefaction evaluation and its mitigation.
In the following, a brief overview of the 2016 research projects within Flagship Programme 2 are presented to give you some flavour of our initial research efforts. The QuakeCoRe activity will remain strong, and we hope to provide updates and regular input of this nature in the years to come, including some detailed research feature stories from our more significant outputs.