Allianz Türkiye aims to contribute raising risk awareness in society on earthquake and fire hazards with this facility which is equipped with various earthquake and fire simulators, testing machines, special equipment and also hands-on training rooms equipped with special demonstrations designed by the best-in-class project sponsors. 

It is one of the best examples of University-Industry Partnership which provides high quality testing services to the academic researches with high accuracy levels as well as conducting accredited industrial tests for mainly local manufacturers.

This center also houses professional risk consultancy services and is aimed to contribute to the training of qualified technicians and engineers for the public and private sectors by acting together with the professional organizations and universities including certification programs. 

Earthquake tests are conducted in this center with two different high quality shaking tables for both structural and non-structural elements including IT server cabinets, electrical cabinets, UPS, transformators, generators, and particles exposed to high frequency mainly for automotive and transportation sectors especially to provide contribution for loss prevention approach.

Besides, reaction to fire tests are conducted mainly for the construction materials in order to identify the combustibility class of the materials including smoke and dropping levels.

Being the only facility with the best accuracy in earthquake testing, Allianz Teknik also provides services to different branches of activity such as automotive and transportation, and it allows conducting many, which could not be conducted domestically before, in our country. Thus, it contributes to the national economy and creates added value.

Allianz Teknik is the authorized seismic and reaction to fire test provider of TSE (Turkish Standards Institute), and authorized seismic test laboratory service provider of TEİAŞ (Turkish Electricity Transmission Corporation) and also a member of Seismic Test Standardization Committee.

Accredited by Turkish Accreditation Institution (TÜRKAK) in 2021, Allianz Teknik, has the capacity to conduct more than 3,000 hours of earthquake testing more than 100 reaction to fire tests annually.

In the center, which hosted more than 10,000 guests since its foundation year, we launched our “Allianz Teknik Meets Children” project as part of the cooperation made with Turkish Education Volunteers Association (TEGV) in order to increase risk awareness in the children and disseminate the social benefit of Allianz Teknik all over the country. Within the scope of the project, we organized online workshops about earthquake and fire risks for the children above the age of 10 in many cities.

As part of TÜBİTAK Support Program for Scientific and Technologic Research Projects, we attempted to establish partnerships with İstanbul Technical University, Sabancı University and Turkish-German University.

First of all, nature has warned us once again that we are living in a region which is laying on highly active fault zones. It was one of the biggest earthquakes occurred in Turkey within the 500 years. The main lesson that we have learned from this devastating earthquake was to design and construct our buildings fully in accordance with the seismic design code. It is also very well understood that the construction quality system is very important, especially to assure that the building is constructed in line with the design project as well as providing the required material quality and workmanship. We have also observed both architectural and structural defects, such as soft story (having a showroom or a store in the first floor of the building of which the height is longer than the upper floors), projections in the plan (having larger floor area of the upper floors than the first floor), hammering effect (being adjacent to the neighboring buildings), plain longitudinal rebars and insufficient stirrup spacemen (since the earthquake performance of a reinforced concrete building is hidden in details), inadequately fixing critical non-structural elements, such as electrical cabinets, server cabinets, suspended ceilings, pipes and emergency generators, lastly selecting immediate usage performance levels (also introducing seismic isolation and special damping systems) during the design phase of the special structures, such as hospitals, schools, hotels, dormitory buildings, etc.  

This devastating earthquake has also shown that our decision, investing on earthquake and fire risk awareness and loss prevention in Turkey as Allianz was totally right in line with our Allianz purpose, ‘’We secure your future!’’. In addition, we have understood that we have important responsibility as Allianz Teknik and we should be much more active in the preventive side not only for industrial buildings, but also for the residential buildings. We will be concentrating on the earthquake risk assessments with our expertise on the high seismic regions together with the responsible parties to define the buildings which have high earthquake risk to support retrofitting or urban transformation projects. We will continue to organize hands-on trainings especially for children and youths to raise risk awareness of our society against earthquake and fire hazards in our center as an important part of the social responsibility activities. Moreover, we will also continue to support academic studies and local producers to provide high quality testing services.