Henar Martín-Sanz

Research

Getting more out of Structures through Monitoring and Simulation

In recent years, developed societies have been faced with the problem of continuous urbanization and excessive energy consumption, closing in on exhaustion of available resources. In view of this, the notions of sustainability and resilience have become paramount in the way developed societies plan ahead and manage resources.

The scope of this project is twofold; on the one hand, we will look into ways of extending the lifetime of existing structures through novel intervention methods and via collection of appropriate sensory information. The aspect of monitoring, i.e. the collection of information from the structure, allows for a deeper knowledge of the system itself and therefore a realistic verification of structural safety. Additionally, a better assessment of the system’s operating condition may enable the extension of the nominal lifetime of existing building stock. This in turn, contributes to the significant reduction of building materials, energy consumption and CO2 emissions, which are detrimental in currently standard approaches that require full replacement of structures once they fulfill their design expectancy, regardless of their actual condition.

On a second level, this work package, WP5, will deal with the simulation and experimental assessment of the novel building approaches proposed within this Joint submission. This pertains to solutions involving hybrid wood, CFRP, and UHPFRC as proposed in work packages WP2, WP3 and WP4 of the Joint Project. It will deal with modelling and simulation on both the element as well as a global structural level, i.e. to the level of a frame assembly focusing on critical components, such as joints. This step is of particular importance when taking into account, that any proposed new technology has to be put through performance tests that validate its efficacy when compared to standard practices that are commonly implemented to date. To this end, it is of the essence to come up with modelling methodologies that can appropriately account for the intricacies of the resulting structural systems.

Funding Source
National research program, NRP70 “Energy Turnaround”, Joint Project: “Concrete Solutions”, Chatzi, E., and Brühwiler, E.: “Getting more out of Structures through monitoring and simulation”, Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) Research Grant, effective 01/06/2015