New Zealand’s Earthquake Commission (EQC) has awarded an annual prize to a revolutionary sliding hinge joint innovation that advances lower damage, affordable seismic engineering.

This year’s Ivan Skinner Award winner Shahab Ramhormozian says New Zealand is on the verge of becoming a seismic engineering world leader with the hinge, which dissipates seismic energy and is also able to be partially replaced or repaired if an earthquake exceeds the maximum load it was designed for.

Auckland researchers have been working closely with peers in Italy and China where the technology has been adopted and tested, and the Optimised Sliding Hinge Joint is currently being used in three Hamilton buildings under construction.

Eight European universities have launched a joint project with a multi-billion euro grant from the European Union, which will soon start construction on the first building in Europe at the University of Salerno.

“We are at a critical stage now to be able to finish the work,” Iranian-born engineer Dr Ramhormozian, who moved to New Zealand over a decade ago, said. "We need to do more so it can be eventually adopted into building codes.”

His prize, awarded by EQC and New Zealand Society for Earthquake Engineering Incorporated (NZSEE), promotes research that reduces the impacts of earthquakes.

EQC says the seismic hinge invention is a game changer in global construction.

The initial idea was conceived by Charles Clifton at the University of Auckland after Northridge and Kobe earthquakes in the mid-1990s in which buildings suffered much more damage than expected, and Gregory MacRae at the University of Canterbury further developed the technology.

Dr Ramhormozian has significantly improved and finetuned it, and the 2022 award will assist in demonstrating that the innovation can be used across a wide range of building types.