Keywords: civil engineering, virtual testing, information and communication technologies, cases.

Physical laboratory-based experiments and tests have been established as a fundamental learning, research and development tool in many areas of civil engineering education, science and practice. However, new areas of research in engineering analysis have come about as a result of the changing roles of computational models and laboratory-based experiments. This new engineering environment is based on highly-validated computer models and associated experimental data that is able to make highly precise predictions of the outcome of physical laboratory-based tests without the need to perform them in a real laboratory. In this respect, virtual testing is rapidly emerging as a key technology in civil engineering.

Although some applications of virtual testing other than related to materials and components have been reported by a number of researchers [1,2,3], most effort has been put into the development of virtual testing environments for composite materials and components. In civil engineering, the NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technologies) has set the standard for other past and ongoing research and development projects related to virtual testing of composite materials and components worldwide. Together with the promises of emerging information and communication technologies (ICT) a new realm of possibilities for developing virtual testing environments has opened.

In order to structure the discussion about the possible impact of emerging ICT on the development of virtual testing environments we present a conceptual scheme of virtual testing environments consisting of three main layers: (1) virtual testing laboratory (system layer), (2) computer models (application layer) and (3) data (data layer) which are embedded in (1) a hardware environment and (2) a software environment). The impact of the following emerging ICT is discussed: grid computing, web services, product data technology, semantic web and soft computing.

In the paper two ongoing research projects related to the development of virtual testing environments for materials in civil engineering at Delft University of Technology are discussed: (1) a virtual testing environment for cementitious materials and (2) a virtual testing environment for civil engineering assessment of windows. Both projects showed the value of the application of virtual testing for composite materials and components in civil engineering. With respect to the application of emerging ICT, we can conclude in these two research projects that their possibilities are largely ignored or very rarely implemented.

1

F. Kuester, T. Hutchinson, "A virtualized laboratory for earthquake engineering education", ASEE Journal of Engineering Education, 15(1), US, 2007. doi:10.1002/cae.20091

2

E. Hallbach, "Development of Simulator for Modelling Robotic Earthmoving Operations", Master thesis, Lulea University of Technology, Finland, 2007.

3

J. Ghaboussi, Y. Hashash, V. Kindratenko, "Real-Time Soil Modelling for machine-Medium Interaction in Virtual Reality", Proceedings 8th International Symposium on Numerical Methods in Geomechanics, Italy, 2002.

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