PhD Studentship: Climate change-resilient geotechnical infrastructure

Warmer temperatures, extreme droughts, and more intensive convective storms are accelerating deterioration of earthworks, degrading resilience. Climate change is a major national security risk. UK critical infrastructure faces a climate adaptation deficit that will cost up to £1 billion/year by 2050. There is an urgent need to understand why, and anticipate when, earthworks failures occur to enable targeted and timely preventative actions.

This PhD will take advantage of the new National Engineered Slope Simulator (NESS) facility; a large-scale, configurable, climate-controlled clay slope testing facility. The long-term experiments will deploy large (5×3×2 m; 45-tonne) compacted clay samples, which are subjected to accelerated wetting/drying cycles to deteriorate hydromechanical performance.

Depending on the selected PhD candidate’s strengths and interests, the project could take one of four directions:

1. Deliver a step-change in understanding of weather and climate change impacts on earthwork hydromechanical performance, which focuses principally on large- and element-scale laboratory testing.
2. Develop novel diagnostic techniques for asset condition appraisal and deterioration detection, which will use extensive laboratory measurements to establish data fusion and AI analytics.
3. Advance capability to forecast deterioration and failure, which will use large-scale testing, numerical simulations, and probabilistic techniques.
4. Enhance understanding of intervention behaviour (e.g., drains, soil nailing) and establish strategies to optimize type, timing, and distribution of interventions to balance added capacity, life extension, cost, and carbon.

Please see this PhD project’s dedicated webpage for more information.

The studentship is for three years and provides a tax-free stipend of £19,237 per annum for the duration of the studentship plus university tuition fees.

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