̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - Robert Mair

Building a more sustainable world

skbf2 — Thu, 19 Sep 2024 10:21:27 +0000

This longstanding partnership between Cambridge, Arup and the Ove Arup Foundation has made our world safer and more sustainable and changed the way professionals are taught.

How does your smart city grow?

sc604 — Fri, 17 Jun 2016 13:08:19 +0000

It can be tough getting people excited about infrastructure because we often don’t notice it until something goes wrong. We expect to turn on the tap and have clean, drinkable water come out. We expect the underground to work. We expect to flick a switch and have the lights come on.

But just think how different expectations were for people living in Victorian London. ̽��ֱ��‘Great Stink’ in 1858, caused by untreated human and industrial waste flowing directly into the Thames, led to near-constant cholera outbreaks. Eventually, the smell in the Houses of Parliament became so bad that the windows had to be covered with heavy curtains, which goaded the politicians of the day into action. Engineer Joseph Bazalgette came to the rescue by creating a sewer network for central London, which relieved the city from cholera epidemics.

Fast-forward 150 years, and London, and the rest of the UK, is generally in fairly decent shape infrastructure-wise. However, literal and figurative cracks are rapidly appearing. ̽��ֱ��London Infrastructure Plan 2050, launched in 2014, states that the capital should be able to accommodate its growth, at least until 2025, within existing boundaries, but estimates that £1.3 trillion will need to be invested in the city’s infrastructure between 2014 and 2050, an amount more than half of the UK’s current GDP.

“Infrastructure, both existing and future, is of paramount importance for supporting economic growth and productivity – and so we must anticipate and plan effectively for the changing needs of society,” says Professor Lord Robert Mair of Cambridge’s Department of Engineering.

“We can’t just build our way out of this – we simply don’t have enough space,” adds Dr Jennifer Schooling, Director of the Cambridge Centre for Smart Infrastructure and Construction (CSIC). “We have to use the existing infrastructure we’ve got and get more and more out of it, and when it’s appropriate, we can build new infrastructure alongside that.”

CSIC, an Innovation and Knowledge Centre jointly funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and Innovate UK, works to bridge the gap between ̽��ֱ�� research and industry in the area of ‘smart’ infrastructure.

Thanks to technological advances over the past two decades, sensors can now be embedded directly into the fabric of our cities, providing valuable information about the ‘health’ of a particular road, tunnel, bridge, building, or any other piece of infrastructure. This information can help identify problems before they become serious, and help get the most out of existing infrastructure, which is particularly important in a small, crowded country like the UK.

CSIC works with different companies and organisations throughout the complex infrastructure supply chain: from owners and operators, designers and builders, to contractors and maintenance personnel, helping them maximise the potential of sensing technology and, by extension, that of the infrastructure we rely on every day.

Since it was founded in 2011, CSIC has built up a network of more than 40 industry partners, including some of the biggest companies in the construction industry, including Laing O’Rourke, Arup and Atkins. It has also worked on some of the largest infrastructure projects in the UK, such as Crossrail and the National Grid power tunnels.

“Because the construction industry is judged on reliability and safety, it is a conservative one, and so we have to really demonstrate our technologies and approaches, to show that they work,” says Schooling. “A conservative industry finds it difficult to grab hold of complex projects, and so we’ve worked really hard to develop consistent methodologies so that we can train industry to use the technologies we’ve developed.”

One of CSIC’s major industry partners, the construction and development company Skanska, has recently established their own company that will make CSIC-developed technology available commercially, after having successfully used it on a project they recently undertook in London. ̽��ֱ��company was demolishing a 12-storey building to replace it with a 16-storey building in central London, on top of a complex subterranean web of tunnels, transport, foundations, sewers and more.

Skanska worked with CSIC to embed fibre optics in the building pile foundations before it was demolished to determine whether the existing piles could be used again or had to be completely replaced to support the new building. ̽��ֱ��fibre optic data showed that the foundations did not have to be completely replaced, as is common practice, which not only saved the company £6 million and six months in added project time, but also won the company a sustainability prize for avoiding pouring the massive amounts of concrete required for completely new piled foundations.

Another CSIC project maximising the value of existing infrastructure is one that is looking to extract the heat from the London Underground to heat and cool the buildings above it. Researchers in Dr Ruchi Choudhary’s group in the Department of Engineering are modelling the amount of heat that can be extracted from the Tube, how many buildings can be heated or cooled, and how that might be affected by future climate change. These geothermal systems offer a potential energy-efficient cooling solution compared with energy-intensive conventional cooling.

“A city’s infrastructure generates many waste streams: the heat generated in the London Underground is a classic example, leading to severely overheated Tube stations,” says Choudhary. “Simulation models allow us to quantify the waste energy that can be usefully harnessed through geothermal boreholes, which makes it possible to demonstrate feasibility and the benefits of operating our infrastructure in more synergistic ways.”

“If there’s one thing we really excel at in this country, it’s making our Victorian infrastructure – such as that designed by Joseph Bazalgette – work well,” adds Schooling. “We need to think about the value that infrastructure brings to our cities, which will help us figure out where and when we should be making new investments, and what impact that will have on a city. If we really understand our infrastructure through data, there’s a huge opportunity to really make a difference to how our cities perform in the future.”

Adds Mair: “Our cities will define the future of society, and smart city infrastructure equipped with modern sensors is essential to achieve the required transformational impact.”

Inset image: geothermal modelling; credit: Ruchi Choudhary.

̽��ֱ��Centre for Smart Infrastructure and Construction is building on advances in sensing technology to learn everything possible about a city’s infrastructure – its tunnels, roads, bridges, sewers and power supplies – in order to maintain it and optimise its use for the future.

Infrastructure, both existing and future, is of paramount importance for supporting economic growth and productivity

Professor Lord Robert Mair

Crossrail

Crossrail tunnel

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Yes

Innovating for the future of cities

Anonymous — Wed, 01 Jun 2016 15:30:00 +0000

There is a clear line of sight on the broad features of the cities of the future.

They will be large, with significantly more than half of the world’s growing population crammed into them.

They will house an increasingly older population, placing stress on services to the elderly and a rising tax burden on young workers whose taxes pay for those services.

They will be environmentally constrained, require a lower environmental impact of almost everything we depend on today, and they will need more resilient infrastructure, buildings and economies as the climate shifts.

In at least the developing world, the megacities will be a complex and messy mix of formal and informal settlements, with no obvious governance structure covering the entire city.

These are very broad sketches of the challenges. ̽��ֱ��more interesting issues revolve around how we respond to those challenges, and how those responses affect the design, operation and governance of cities. How we respond will in turn profoundly influence the quality of life of residents and what it feels like to live in such cities.

̽��ֱ��future depends on the innovations we create and put in place today. But what form might those innovations take? We divide them into the physical city, urban governance and the choices made by the residents of a city. Each is the focus of intensive research at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge in collaboration with our partners elsewhere and in the public and private sectors.

̽��ֱ��physical city

Future cities must become smarter, since resources and services will be stretched to their limits. Our cities today are built on projections of long-term needs, and locked into the infrastructure to meet those needs with a large margin of safety so they are robust against different potential futures. This is wasteful of materials and energy.

Buildings and infrastructure of the future will be fitted with sensors monitoring every aspect of operations from climate to energy performance to material safety and service demand. Energy will flow in real time to where it is most needed. Transport will be directed around areas of high air pollution so human health is preserved. Buildings will be monitored for stresses, allowing actions to be taken before catastrophic failure, reducing the over-engineering of buildings with more concrete and steel than may ever be required.

̽��ֱ��same sensors will monitor the climate and allow buildings and infrastructure to respond so damage from extreme weather events is minimised. ̽��ֱ��technologies for climate adaptation are well known. ̽��ֱ��problem is how to allocate limited technological and financial resources so the overall impact on a city by a changing climate is minimised. This requires understanding the role of specific parts of the physical city in the economy and services. An approach is needed to rationalising adaptation resources so they are used wisely to protect the city’s economy and services, in turn ensuring livelihoods and well-being are preserved. Macroeconomic models linked to engineering knowledge allow decision-makers to understand where adaptation and recovery resources can best be directed to get a city back on its feet after an extreme weather event.

Governance

Cities will become living laboratories for sustainability, requiring changes in governance. Since cities are heterogeneous mixtures of planned and unplanned buildings, formal and informal developments, no single set of solutions to service provision, crime, health or education will work everywhere within the city. Systems of governance will allow for experimentation, testing solutions in some parts of the city but not others, with the design of those trials allowing us to see what works where and under what conditions.

̽��ֱ��city will become a laboratory in the scientific sense, with the language of case-control and cohort studies. ̽��ֱ��messy and complex nature of cities will be turned into an asset, allowing for natural experiments. This in turn requires governance systems that embrace experimentation; politicians who are willing to admit when an experiment has failed and move on to the next experiment; a public that will not penalise those who are brave enough to try something in the face of profound uncertainty and then adjust their decisions when evidence emerges.

Cities will also find an intermediate ground between top-down planning (as in the ‘new towns’ such as Milton Keynes) and bottom-up growth (think of the favelas of South American cities). Bottom-up solutions allow for highly local differences in economies, architectural style, material and energy consumption. However, they can reduce the efficiency of resource use of the city when viewed as a system. ̽��ֱ��‘transmission’ of a future city, sitting somewhere between the Mayor’s office and neighbourhood groups, will enable local solutions to remain local while facilitating solutions for the greater good of the city overall.

̽��ֱ��challenge is to design a governance structure that enables the efficiency of technocratic, systemic control of planning and development to take place while also allowing citizens to develop solutions that work for their local conditions. ̽��ֱ��challenge is to find a system where bottom-up and top-down decisions co-exist comfortably.

People

Citizens must become smarter as well. Future technologies will not simply provide data. They will be linked to data analytics that reflect who is taking decisions, why, when and where. ̽��ֱ��data will be turned into information to guide decisions on (for example) assets, and transmitted in easily understood form to the pinch points where decisions are taken. People will be re-connected to the ebb and flow of material and energy in the city, with much deeper understandings of how their personal actions influence the performance of their city, and how the information around them influences their own decisions on use of materials, energy and services.

Future cities will make increasing use of natural ventilation based on advances in ecology and fluid dynamics. With the transport system dominated by much quieter electric vehicles, windows will be left open, indoor pollution will be reduced and levels of comfort will rise as the heat island effect disappears. Improved walking and cycling paths will bring the benefits of exercise and re-connect people to their neighbourhood activities. Health and well-being will be improved by, rather than be collaterally damaged from, urban life.

These are just three examples of future challenges being explored at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge in collaboration with partners at other universities in the UK and globally, and with public and private sector organisations. Taken together, they are providing the evidence base that will solve the high level and ground level challenges, and enable the top-down and bottom -up solutions, that are emerging as urban life becomes the norm for a growing global population.

Professor Doug Crawford-Brown is at the Department of Land Economy, Professor Lord Robert Mair is at the Department of Engineering and Professor Koen Steemers is at the Department of Architecture.

Today, we commence a month-long focus on the future of cities. To begin, Doug Crawford-Brown, Robert Mair and Koen Steemers describe the challenges our future cities will face and how mitigation depends on the innovations we create and put in place today.

How we respond to these challenges will profoundly influence the quality of life of residents and what it feels like to live in such cities.

Doug Crawford-Brown, Robert Mair, Koen Steemers

GLAS-8

Dark City

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Yes

Professor Robert Mair appointed to House of Lords

th288 — Thu, 15 Oct 2015 15:01:59 +0000

As a crossbencher, he will owe no allegiance to a political party and will maintain the ability to take part in legislative debates free of party considerations.

Robert Mair was appointed Professor of Geotechnical Engineering at Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� in 1998 and was Master of Jesus College 2001-2011, where he remains a Fellow.

He is one of the founding Directors of the Geotechnical Consulting Group (GCG), an international consulting company based in London, started in 1983. He was appointed Chief Engineering Adviser to the Laing O’Rourke Group in 2011.

After graduating in 1971 from Cambridge ̽��ֱ��, where he read Engineering at Clare College, he worked continuously in industry until 1998, except for a three year period in the late 1970’s when he returned to Cambridge to work for his PhD on tunnelling in soft ground.

His early involvement with tunnels began at that time, when he undertook research for the UK Transport Research Laboratory on the subject of centrifuge modelling of tunnel construction in soft ground. He was awarded a PhD for this work in 1979.

Throughout his career he has specialised principally in underground construction, providing advice on numerous projects world-wide involving soft ground tunnelling, retaining structures, deep excavations and foundations. Recent international projects have included railway tunnels in the cities of Amsterdam, Barcelona, Bologna, Florence, Rome, Singpapore and Warsaw, and motorway tunnels in Turkey.

In the UK he has been closely involved with the design and construction of the Jubilee Line Extension for London Underground, and with the Channel Tunnel Rail Link (now HS1) and Crossrail projects.

He was responsible for the introduction of compensation grouting in the UK as a novel technique for controlling settlement of structures during tunnel construction - on the Waterloo Escalator Tunnel Project. ̽��ֱ��technique was widely used on the Jubilee Line Extension Project for the protection of many historic buildings, including the Big Ben Clock Tower at the Palace of Westminster.

He has been a member of Expert Review Panels on major international underground construction projects, and is currently Co-Chair of the International Advisory Board for the Singapore Land Transport Authority, advising on design and construction aspects of all underground transport tunnels and deep excavations in Singapore.

Robert Mair was awarded the British Geotechnical Society Prize in 1980 for his work on tunnels, the Institution of Civil Engineers Geotechnical Research Medal in 1994 and their Gold Medal in 2004.

He has been a Board Member of the International Society of Soil Mechanics and Foundation Engineering (ISSMGE), and for 10 years was Chairman of its Technical Committee (TC 28) on Underground Construction in Soft Ground.

He gave evidence to a House of Lords Select Committee on the Crossrail project in London and is a member of Crossrail’s Engineering Expert Panel.

He leads a major research group at Cambridge and is Principal Investigator for a recently awarded Innovation and Knowledge Centre on Smart Infrastructure and Construction (CSIC), a group with the mission of turning research into commercial application to transform the future of infrastructure, funded by EPSRC/TSB and industry to a total value of £17m.

He chaired the Royal Society/Royal Academy of Engineering Review of Shale Gas Extraction in the UK; the report was published in June 2012.

He is a Fellow of the Institution of Civil Engineers, a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering (its Senior Vice-President 2008-2011), and a Fellow of the Royal Society. He was awarded a CBE in the 2010 New Year's Honours list.

Professor Robert Mair CBE, Sir Kirby Laing Professor of Civil Engineering and Head of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, has been appointed an independent crossbench peer in recognition of his world-renowned role as a civil engineer, and his extensive practical and academic expertise on infrastructure and construction.

I am greatly honoured by this appointment which I view as also a tribute to my many colleagues in CSIC and elsewhere in the Department of Engineering.

Robert Mair

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Yes

Cambridge awarded £18 million in funding to support UK infrastructure research

sc604 — Tue, 24 Mar 2015 15:59:05 +0000

̽��ֱ�� ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge will receive £18 million in funding to ensure that the UK’s infrastructure is resilient and responsive to environmental and economic impacts, as announced by the Chancellor in last week’s budget. ̽��ֱ��Cambridge funding will be used to support research in the application of advanced sensor technologies to the monitoring of the UK’s existing and future infrastructure, in order to protect and maintain it.

̽��ֱ��funding is part of the wider UK Collaboration for Research in Infrastructure & Cities (UKCRIC), which is a £138 million capital investment that will be centred around the Olympic Park in Stratford and will include 13 university partners from across the UK. A formal business case will be developed over the next few months.

̽��ֱ��proposed research stems from a need for UK national and local infrastructure (such as transport, water, waste, energy and ICT systems) to be fit for purpose for supporting societal development in a changing world.

UKCRIC will integrate knowledge, tools and methods from a wide range of disciplines. Its initial case proposes four strands:

(A) Investment in capital equipment and facilities (national ‘Laboratories’) that underpin transformative research for all partners and stakeholders

(B) A national ‘Observatory’ and living laboratories that will establish a network of linked infrastructure ‘observatories’ to test current and proposed urban infrastructure systems, and to enable rapid trialling of solutions

(C) A multi-level modelling and simulation environment that allows ‘what if’ experiments to be carried out in a high performance computing environment

(D) Creation of a Coordination Node (CN) to integrate activities and industry collaboration across UKCRIC

Once a business case for UKCRIC has been agreed, the Collaboration will hear further details on funding allocation and capital investments.

̽��ֱ��Cambridge funding will be used to build a National Research Facility for Infrastructure Sensing on the West Cambridge site, which will build upon the expertise of the ̽��ֱ��’s Centre for Smart Infrastructure and Construction (CSIC). ̽��ֱ��new building will be an interdisciplinary centre for sensors and instrumentation for infrastructure monitoring and assessment, spanning scales from an individual asset, such as a tunnel, building or bridge, to a complex system such as a railway or a city district. More advanced sensors and appropriate data analysis will ensure better product quality, enhanced construction safety, and smarter asset management.

“Building a UK infrastructure research community like UKCRIC is important to help us design, build and maintain infrastructure which is resilient, adaptable and sustainable,” said Professor Robert Mair, Head of Civil Engineering and of the Centre for Smart Infrastructure and Construction (CSIC) at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge. “ ̽��ֱ��UK needs to do more to invest in its infrastructure and infrastructure services, which are so important to its citizens. This is an issue which cannot be ignored, so we welcome this new investment as a positive way to engage academia and industry in protecting and growing the UK’s infrastructure base.”

EPSRC (Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council)’s Chief Executive, Professor Philip Nelson, said: “EPSRC welcomes any additional investment in science and engineering, as these are the drivers of innovation and growth. We are particularly pleased to see the need to continue support for research in areas such as infrastructure and energy recognised, as they are so critical to ensuring the economic growth and prosperity of the UK. These announcements will build on our previous investments and provide the expertise and skills we need for the future.”

Cambridge is one of 13 universities receiving funding from UKCRIC. ̽��ֱ��consortium is being coordinated by ̽��ֱ�� College London.

Funding announced by the Chancellor in last week’s budget is part of a wider £138 million programme to support the UK’s infrastructure and cities.

This is an issue which cannot be ignored, so we welcome this new investment as a positive way to engage academia and industry in protecting and growing the UK’s infrastructure base

Robert Mair

Jim Nix

St Pancras Int'l

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Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike

Cambridge heads for Hay

jfp40 — Thu, 10 Apr 2014 09:20:09 +0000

̽��ֱ��Cambridge Series has been running for six years at the prestigious Festival and is part of the ̽��ֱ��’s commitment to public engagement. ̽��ֱ��Festival runs from 22nd May to 1st June and is now open for bookings.

This year's line-up includes Sir John Gurdon who was jointly awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for the discovery that mature cells can be converted to stem cells. He will talk about his pioneering work on cloning.

Other speakers include Dr Ha-Joon Chang on economics, classicist Professor Paul Cartledge on after Thermopylae, Dame Barbara Stocking, former chief executive of Oxfam GB and president of Murray Edwards College, on the challenges for women in the workplace, Professor Chris Dobson and Dr Mary Dobson on Alzheimer's and other plagues, economist Professor Noreena Hertz on smart thinking and Professor Robert Mair on tunnelling into the future of our cities.

Professor Richard Evans, president of Wolfson College, will talk about the history of conspiracy theories, Dr John Swenson-Wright from the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies will ask if North Korea is the perennial crisis state and Dr Robin Hesketh from the Department of Biochemistry will attempt to demystify cancer.

Several of the talks will take the form of a conversation: Professor Simon Blackburn will debate the uses and abuses of self love with journalist Rosie Boycott; novelist and playwright Biyi Bandele, a former Judith E. Wilson Fellow at Churchill College, will be in conversation with Dr Malachi McIntosh from the Department of English about migrant writing; Professor Henrietta Moore, William Wyse Chair of Social Anthropology, will talk about the future of civil activism with Ricken Patel, founding President of Avaaz, the world's largest online activist community; and psychologist Dr Terri Apter will debate how women follow, resist and play with the stereotypes that define them with author and alumna Zoe Strimpel.

Other Cambridge academics speaking at Hay are Professor Stefan Collini discussing higher education’s two cultures - the humanities and science - and historian Professor David Reynolds.

Peter Florence, director of the Hay Festival, said: "Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� nurtures and challenges the world's greatest minds, and offers the deepest understanding of the most intractable problems and the most thrilling opportunities. And for one week a year they bring that thinking to a field in Wales and share it with everyone. That's a wonderful gift."

Nicola Buckley, head of public engagement at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, said: “ ̽��ֱ��Cambridge series is a wonderful way to share fascinating research from the ̽��ֱ�� with the public. ̽��ֱ��Hay Festival draws an international cross-section of people, from policy makers to prospective university students. We have found that Hay audiences are highly interested in the diversity of Cambridge speakers, and ask some great questions. We look forward to another fantastic series of speakers, with talks and debates covering so many areas of research and key ideas emerging from Cambridge, relevant to key issues faced globally today."

For tickets, go to: www.hayfestival.org

A host of Cambridge academics, including Nobel Laureate Sir John Gurdon, will be speaking on subjects ranging from stem cell technology and Alzheimer’s to the future of North Korea and the history of conspiracy theories at this year’s Hay Festival.

Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� nurtures and challenges the world's greatest minds, and offers the deepest understanding of the most intractable problems and the most thrilling opportunities

Peter Florence, Director of Hay Festival

Hay Festival

Night shot at Hay Festival

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Yes

Natural disasters, infrastructure and the “new normal”

tdk25 — Tue, 15 Jan 2013 15:51:27 +0000

Some of the worst natural disasters of the last decade have radically changed the ways in which we strive to protect communities from similar, future tragedies, a leading engineer will explain this week.

Citing a roll-call that includes the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, the Canterbury earthquake and Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy, Professor Tom O’Rourke of Cornell ̽��ֱ�� will argue that these and other similarly devastating incidents have established a “new normal” for the way in which we prepare ourselves for extreme events.

He will be speaking at the inaugural lecture of the Cambridge Centre for Smart Infrastructure and Construction (CSIC). This marks the formal commencement of a multitude of new research projects on infrastructure, many of which are designed to enable society to protect critical infrastructure from the unexpected. ̽��ֱ��lecture will take place in the Department of Engineering, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, on 17 January, at 6pm.

Researchers at the Centre are already developing and improving wireless technologies, fibre optics and other types of sensors, with a view to establishing them as the norm for the construction industry and those in asset management responsible for monitoring bridges, tunnels, roads, railways, and other types of infrastructure.

As Professor O’Rourke will discuss, however, that norm is already being dramatically reshaped by the game-changing incidents of recent years. His talk – “ ̽��ֱ��New Normal for Natural Disasters” – will argue that these have forced a shift in the way in which the risks of natural disasters occurring are evaluated. In turn, that necessitates a different approach to the question of protecting critical infrastructure itself.

His talk will examine the threat posed by potential future earthquakes to the water supply of Southern California, or that of hurricanes to New York City. It will also propose a strategy for improving infrastructure resilience at a time when the financial resources sometimes available to governments wishing to do so are limited.

̽��ֱ��Centre’s inaugural lecture will be followed by a seminar, the following day, led by another specialist in the field, Professor Bill Spencer of the ̽��ֱ�� of Illinois, who will focus on the potential of new technology to continuously monitor the integrity of infrastructure in real-time. This will not only improve public safety, Spencer will argue, but also simultaneously reduce maintenance and inspection costs. His presentation will draw on the real-life example of a network of smart sensors which have been used on the Jindo Bridge, a structure in South Korea with a 344 metre main span.

Radio 4 listeners can also listen to Professor Robert Mair, Principal Investigator at the Centre for Smart Infrastructure and Construction, on this week’s Life Scientific, where he discusses tunnel construction in busy cities and the novel application of sensors to the construction industry, among other subjects. ̽��ֱ��show was broadcast today (Tuesday, 15 January) at 9am, is repeated at 9.30pm, and is available on BBC iPlayer.

After a year of preparation following the Centre’s establishment in 2011, numerous research projects are now underway, focusing on its main mission, which is to develop and commercialise technologies which will change the way in which infrastructure is managed. In particular, researchers are examining new and innovative ways in which to use technologies in sensors and data management to monitor the day-to-day performance of bridges, tunnels, roads and more.

Doing so remotely is, as Friday’s seminar implies, particularly valuable where the infrastructure is hard for people to reach and monitor themselves. Finding ways in which sensors can harvest their own energy so that they can continue to operate without needing to be maintained is therefore particularly important. One breakthrough in this area is the recently reported development of a device which can convert the vibration of passing traffic into electricity, enabling a sensor to generate its own power, so that batteries are not required.

In addition, the Centre is concerned with the practical purpose of commercialising these technologies, and developing them to a stage where their use in industry is common practice. ̽��ֱ��research programmes have been developed in unison with construction companies and partners from the IT, electronics and materials sectors with the aim of developing tools that will be of practical use to industry once the research stage is complete. In the long term, it is hoped that this will lead to cradle-to-grave monitoring of infrastructure around the world, both in new and existing structures, vastly improving public safety when disaster next strikes.

̽��ֱ��Japanese and Canterbury earthquakes, Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy and a host of other modern natural disasters have changed the game for those striving to protect our infrastructure from extreme events. ̽��ֱ��inaugural lecture at a Cambridge Centre dedicated to this cause will hear how.

̽��ֱ��talk will examine the threat posed by potential future earthquakes to the water supply of Southern California, or that of hurricanes to New York City.

NASA.

Hurricane Katrina makes landfall in the US. Speaking this week in Cambridge, engineer Tom O’Rourke will describe such disasters as game-changers for those wishing to protect people from similar, future events.

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