Ground and Underground Infrastructure Damage Evaluation (GUIDE)

All surface and buried infrastructure have a limited safe life and it is vital to evaluate their condition and structural integrity during their service life to avoid potential catastrophic failure due to their deterioration. Accurate assessment of infrastructure's condition is of significant financial and strategic importance and allows better resources planning. The research presented in this proposal offers an innovative solution in the form of a unified framework to assess and evaluate the condition and structural integrity of both underground utility and surface transportation infrastructure, and its surrounding ground, by means of combining physical non-destructive testing and numerical modelling. The physical tests will be used to generate necessary data for the damage detection algorithm. The numerical simulation involves a hybrid back-calculation algorithm based on integration of finite element analysis and a novel evolutionary computing technique. The proposed numerical approach will be able to capture the non-linear and complex behaviour of both the ground and the buried utility and detect damage in infrastructure by characterising reduction in the constitutive properties of the finite element model of the system between two time-separated inferences. The proposed framework in this project will provide sufficient information on mechanical and structural condition of a system and will enable asset managers to make informed decisions with respect to what, where, when and how interventions are required with emphasis on structural stability and integrity of the infrastructure.

This innovative multidisciplinary project will deliver an enhanced tool which can be used to evaluate structural stability and condition assessment of both surface transportation and buried utility infrastructure, and their relationship to the supporting properties of the ground. Using this advanced tool, it will be possible to improve our understanding of condition of infrastructure and provide a more accurate prediction of their service life. This will enable asset managers to efficiently plan their resources, and enhance sustainability and resilience of existing surface and underground infrastructure. The proposed tool will have huge public impact by saving millions of pounds of tax payers' money by providing a better prediction, compared with existing condition assessment techniques, for the remaining safe life of our infrastructure. In addition to asset managers, the proposal will have substantial short- and long-term benefits for asset owners, designers, contractors, researchers, government decision makers, and society as a whole.
In addition, there are a number of strategic investments being made by Government in infrastructure research that this proposal would fit with. For example, this work provides an underpinning platform for the National Buried Infrastructure Facility (NBIF) of the UK Collaboratorium for Research in Infrastructure & Cities (UKCRIC) which will be developed at the UoB, and UKCRIC activities as a whole. Moreover, the objectives of this proposal can support those of the UKCRIC in terms of establishment of world-leading computation and big data infrastructure for the modelling, simulation, and visualisation of cities and infrastructure.
The outcomes of this project will contribute towards improving the condition assessment and maintenance of surface transport and buried utility assets and ultimately enhancing the state of our infrastructures; an important matter particularly considering the decline of the UK's ranking in quality of infrastructure in the World Economic Forum rankings as reported by the ICE State of the Nation 2014.