New facility set to change the way major infrastructure is designed

A new facility promises to deliver cost savings and carbon reduction for high value infrastructure projects like railways, bridges, and offshore wind farms.

The facility will look at how buildings and infrastructure interact with the ground when subjected to dynamic loads, allowing researchers to identify more efficient building methods and improve the safety of future infrastructure.

The University of Bristol has developed the new UKCRIC Soil-Foundation-Structure interaction (SoFSI) facility after receiving £12m in funding from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council.

The facility will allow for large, close to prototype scale experiments for us by both academics and industry.

Anastasios Sexos, Professor of Earthquake Engineering, said: ‘Ensuring the long-term safety of critical infrastructure is paramount, particularly when it comes to building nuclear power stations or high-speed rail. The aim of this testing facility is to inform design that is not only safer but also cost-efficient. Investigating how buildings and infrastructure interact with the ground under natural and man-made hazards allows us to improve the smartness and resiliency of our infrastructure while at a lower financial cost and a reduced environmental footprint.’

Dr Flavia De Luca, Senior Lecturer in Structural and Earthquake Engineering, added: ‘At the University of Bristol, we’re investing in state-of-the-art testing facilities that will help cut the cost of building the infrastructure of the future. For example, high speed rail will require many new bridges to cross waterways, roads and other rail lines. SoFSI has been designed to help us understand, among other issues, how the span of lower cost, minimal maintenance integral bridges can be extended so that new high speed railway lines would be faster to construct, cheaper to maintain, more resilient to climate change, and enable us to minimise resource requirements.’

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Photo supplied by University of Bristol