DIGItal and BIOpolymer assisted RAILway embankment reinforcement

Railway embankments are at the risk of serious deformation caused either by the dynamic loads from moving vehicles, geohazards or both, and as such pose a threat to not only safety, but comfortable rail operations.

Given that Europe cannot always be building its way out of ageing railway infrastructure, it must therefore retrofit and complement existing assets with new technologies.

Moreover, the ability to predict and repair damaged railway earthwork in a cost-effective and time-efficient manner to ensure a safer, more reliable, efficient, sustainable and resilient railway earthwork infrastructure offers a great value not just to transport network operators but also to utilities, insurance companies and government agencies.

Therefore, this fellowship improves the resiliency of railway earthwork infrastructure and mitigates potential economic, life, and property losses resulting from failure to apply a systematic approach.

A toolkit and platform to enable the integration of resiliency-improving forecasting will be developed by combining traditional laboratory and field studies, data mining, machine learning, uncertainty quantification and reliability-based design so to utilize the data to its full potential, and an ecofriendly reinforcement control by using biopolymer for railway embankment deformation.

This project will address critical gaps remaining in our understanding of the life cycle performance of biopolymer-reinforced railway earthworks related to material synthesis, degradation, repair as well as the interaction with the soil ecosystem through integrated geochemical and geotechnical experiments and numerical modeling.