This web site describes the Structures and Materials Laboratory (SMTL) operated by the Structural Engineering and Structural Mechanics group in the Dept. of Civil Engineering at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

It formerly hosted the Fast Hybrid Testing laboratory (FHT) which was for five years a node of the George E. Brown, Jr. Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES)

The FHT laboratory is open for use as a national laboratory for researchers and for contract testing by private companies across the country who are interested in conducting real-time (or pseudo-dynamic) hybrid simulations of structures subjected to earthquakes, wind, and other extreme loadings.

The laboratory specializes in medium to large scale testing and accompanying numerical simulation. An other FHT laboratory specializes in real-time hybrid simulations. In this innovative simulation paradigm a substructure is physically tested in the laboratory floor while a complementary one is numerically analyzed by a finite element. Both simulations are tightly coupled and run at increments of 1/1,024 of a second. The FHT laboratory includes extensive computational and archiving facilities, and the laboratory supports interactive remote teleparticipation of experimental research.