Innovation and Networking for Fatigue and Reliability Analysis of Structures – Training for Assessment of Risk

INFRASTAR aims to develop knowledge, expertise and skills for optimal and reliable management of structures. The generic methodology will be applied to bridges and wind turbines in relation to fatigue offering the opportunity to deal with complementary notions (such as old and new asset management, unique and similar structures, wind and traffic actions) while addressing 3 major challenges:
•advanced modelling of concrete fatigue behaviour,
•new non destructive testing methods for early aged damage detection,
•probabilistic approach of structure reliability under fatigue.

INFRASTAR proposes innovative solutions for civil infrastructure asset management so that 12 Early Stage Researchers (ESR) will acquire a high employment profile in close dialogue between industry and academic partners.

Benefit of cross-experience and inter-disciplinary synergies will create new knowledge. Modern engineering methods, including probabilistic approaches, risk and reliability assessment tools, will take into account the effective structural behaviour of existing bridges and wind turbines by exploiting monitored data. Existing methods and current state-of-the art are based on excessive conservatism, which produces high costs and hinders sustainability.

INFRASTAR will improve knowledge for optimising the design of new structures, for more realistic verification of structural safety and more accurate prediction of future lifetime of the existing structures. That is a challenge for a sustainable development because it reduces building material and energy consumption as well as CO2 production.

Within the global framework of optimal infrastructure asset management, INFRASTAR will result in a multi-disciplinary body of knowledge covering generic problems from the design stage process of the new civil infrastructures up to recycling after dismantlement. This approach and the proposed methods and tools are new and will allow a step forward for innovative and effective processes.

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 676139. The grant is gratefully acknowledged.

Key figures:
• European contribution: 3 161 113€
• 5 European countries: Denmark, France, Germany, Poland, and Switzerland
• 4-years project
• 8 beneficiaries:
o IFSTTAR (project coordinator): http://www.ifsttar.fr/accueil/
o EPFL: https://www.epfl.ch/index.en.html
o Aalborg University: http://www.en.aau.dk/
o BAM: https://www.bam.de/Navigation/EN/Home/
o COWI: http://www.cowi.com/
o PHIMECA: http://www.phimeca.com/?lang=en
o GuD: http://www.gudconsult.de/en.html
o NeoStrain: http://www.neostrain.pl/en/index.php
• 2 partners organisations: BAST and EIFFAGE
• 1 advisory board with 6 members from academia and industries: University of Surrey, Wroclaw University of Science and Technology, TNO, Total, Deutsche Bahn, DNV-GL
• 3 scientific work packages:
o Monitoring and auscultation
o Structure and action models
o Reliability approaches for decision making
• 12 ESRs (PhD students) from 10 different countries

The 12 ESRs benefit from a unique network whom the goal is to better understand the concrete infrastructures behaviour under fatigue from different prospects but complementary. To do so, the ESRs of the 3 work packages exchange inputs and outputs with each other through data and “shared objects”.