Commercialisation of Smart Foundation System

The construction industry consumes around 400 million tonnes of materials every year, a quarter of all raw materials used in the economy. It also produces annually three times the amount of waste generated by all UK households combined. The industry produces 90 million tonnes of inert waste every year, and approximately 10% of UK carbon dioxide emissions are associated with the manufacture and transport of construction materials and the construction processes. It is therefore important that the construction industry changes the way it designs and builds to reduce its environmental impact and to enable the UK to meet its carbon dioxide reduction commitments. The main theme of this proposal is to achieve the goal of this initiative from the geotechnical aspects of building construction using the outcome of an EPSRC project Smart Foundations with Distributed Fibre Optics Technology (EP/D040000/1) . The project delivered the following research outcomes: (i) a foundation design tool that optimises the layout and geometries of foundations (both piles and raft), thereby minimising the use of construction materials while achieving similar building performance, (ii) a foundation design tool that considers reuse of existing foundations for new buildings, and (iii) an inexpensive optical fibre strain measurement system to ensure the foundation based on the optimised design is performing as predicted in both short- and long-terms. This follow-on project aims to commercialise the research outcomes by converting the complex algorithms developed on research-based platforms to more user-friendly formats so they can be used directly by the industry. It consists of the following two major efforts: (a) development of middleware that converts raw Optical Fibre Strain (OFS) data to engineering performance data and (ii) coding of the foundation design tool into C++. The expected outcome is an engineering software package that aids the design and optimisation analyses of new and reuse foundations, determines the need and optimum locations of foundation instrumentation, and converts raw OFS data into engineering data for short- and long-term monitoring endeavours.