Taiwan Building Technology Center has signed the MOU with the Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research Center of UC Berkeley in Dec. 2018 aiming to establish joint research center.

On Dec. 10, 2018, Director Chen of TBTC and Director Mosalam of PEER has signed the MOU at UC Berkeley campus looking forward through various activities including conducting joint research programs, exchanging students and faculty members, and co-organizing international events to establishing a joint research center in the near future.

In 2007, Taiwan Building Technology Center (TBTC) was established by the grant from the Ministry of Education under its Top Universities and Elite Research Centers Development Plan aiming to developing new building technologies that can enhance the positive impact of our built environment on the safety and quality of people’s lives. The strategic focus of TBTC is to provide a platform integrating interdisciplinary research teams, to conduct field experiments at the TBTC building, to build up international cooperation relationships with renowned building research centers, to disseminate research findings through industrial cooperation, and to increase competitiveness of building-related industries. 

In the last 10 years, the TBTC has produced more than 200 patents and implemented 120 cases of technology transfer. Annual profits earned from patent and technology transfers have been about 22 million NT dollars on average. Meanwhile, the TBTC research teams have participated in 9 projects of FP7 and H2020-Energy Efficient Building. The Featured Areas Research Center Program within the framework of the 5-year Higher Education Sprout Project has been launched by the Ministry of Education in Taiwan in 2018. Based on the funding support from Ministry of Education, the TBTC is continuing to focus on research of energy efficient building and hazards prevention aiming to strengthen research capability, to cultivate young scientists, to raise international reputation, to help solving social issues and increasing competitiveness of industry. One of the major action plans is to establish partner relationship with worldwide renowned research centers.
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The PEER center is well-known that the PEER Ground Motion database has proved to be very popular among engineers in the earthquake-related disciplines, who are increasingly using it for selection and modification of records to analyze computer models of buildings, bridges, and other facilities. The PEER mission is to develop and disseminate technologies to support performance-based earthquake engineering, and the PEER programs in research, education, industry partnerships, and outreach are geared to producing the technology and human resources necessary to transition from current design and assessment methods to performance-based methods. The primary goal is to produce and test through research the fundamental information and enabling technologies required for performance-based earthquake engineering.

Director Chen of TBTC (middle) and Director Mosalam of PEER Center (left3) has signed the MOU at the UC Berkeley campus