The Kick-off meeting was hosted by CIMNE (International Centre for Numerical Methods in Engineering), and attended by representatives of all the consortium partners. The alliance is bringing together three regions (Europe, Latin America and East Asia), and is composed of by the Civil and Computational Engineering Centre of Swansea University, the Research Centre in Mathematics (CIMAT) and Tsinghua University, besides CIMNE. 

The TCAiNMaND project aims at building a coordinated Sino-Latin American-European team of researchers sharing expertise to jointly explore and develop open codes and numerical methods for designing effective tools to mitigate major natural disasters in the three regions, by means of a collaborative interchange of software resources, engineering knowledge and scientific experts in the different fields. 

Natural disasters are a pose a major hazard for almost all the countries in the world, and are considered a priority concern by a large number of governments. Mexico and China are two of the most vulnerable countries, which regularly suffer from earthquakes, floods, tsunamis and wildfires, to mention some of the most important disasters. TCAiNMaND approaches the challenges from its engineering dimension, and more specifically, on how numerical methods and simulation software can forecast and prevent the causes of natural disasters, and also how software tools will serve to analyse and mitigate the effects of such adversities. The work will be developed in a number of areas: real time computations, urban resilience against natural hazards, new engineering materials for safer buildings, structural collapse under earthquake loading, image analysis applied to disaster monitoring, and multiobjective optimization for decision making for natural disasters. 

With a funding from the European Commission of more than 400.000 euro, the project will last for four years involving more than 40 researchers of the three regions. 

For further information: Sònia Sagristà (ssagrista@cimne.upc.edu)