TRUSS — Training in Reducing Uncertainty in Structural Safety

Results in brief

Training in Reducing Uncertainty in Structural Safety

TRUSS is a Marie-Sklodowska Innovative Training Network sponsored by the European Commission, that aims to protect Europe’s infrastructure. European infrastructure is ageing. Decades of use, population growth, and changing environmental conditions are taking their toll. Managing this deterioration is tricky because it’s not always clear how to best identify and repair structural flaws early – before they cause safety issues or require a major financial investment to fix. This innovative new training program aims to help solve this issue. The broad goal of the program is to ensure that Europe’s buildings, roads, railways, ships, and energy plants continue to serve the population safely for decades to come. The program fosters a unique pairing of academic training and industrial application, with a bit of public outreach thrown in. The participants include fourteen early-stage researchers, also called ESRs, who are recruited from all over the world. Each participant is expected to complete structured training, perform novel research, and publicly disseminate their work. For their efforts, the ESRs will receive doctoral degrees following a successful VIVA defence of their research – not to mention an excellent head start on a productive career in infrastructure preservation. The highly collaborative, multidisciplinary training network consisted of six universities, eleven industry participants, and one research institute from five European countries. Each ESR was assigned a main supervisor from one institution and sector (academic or industrial) and a co-supervisor from another. Aside from hands-on experience at the main hosting institution, training consisted of secondments at other institutions within the TRUSS network. The ESRs also participated in network-wide meetings every 6 months that included intensive, highly-focused modules on different topics related to the assessment of structural safety as well as on business and entrepreneurial skills. At these meetings, the ESRs also gave seminars on the state of their research projects. This setup gave ESRs exposure to different sectors, access to a wide range of subject-matter experts, and a chance to work on communication skills.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union

Project objective

The growth of cities, impacts of climate change and the massive cost of providing new infrastructure provide the impetus for this proposal – entitled Training in Reducing Uncertainty in Structural Safety (TRUSS) – which will maximize the potential of infrastructure that already exists. If flaws in a structure can be identified early, the cost of repair will be vastly reduced, and here an effective monitoring system would allow identifying the optimum time to repair as well as improving structural safety. But safety is difficult to quantify and requires a deep understanding of the uncertainty associated to measurements and models for the structure and the loads. TRUSS will gather this understanding by bringing together an intersectoral and multidisciplinary collaboration between 4 Universities, 11 Industry participants and 1 research institute from 6 European countries. The consortium will combine and share expertise to offer training at an advanced level as new concepts for monitoring, modelling and reliability analysis of structures are emerging all the time. TRUSS will make knowledge of structural safety grow by incorporating these emerging technologies (hi-tech monitoring and manufacturing, computing, etc.) into the training programme and it will support job creation by enabling a wider talent pool of skilled and accredited engineering graduates with business, entrepreneurship, communication, project management and other transferrable skills. The training programme will be structured into taught modules combined with original research supported by secondments that will expose 14 fellows to both academia and industry. While developing tools that will reduce uncertainty in structural safety and improve infrastructure management, TRUSS will lay the basis for an advanced doctoral programme that will qualify graduates for dealing with the challenges of an aging European infrastructure stock, thereby enhancing their career prospects in both industry and academia.

Original text from CORDIS.

Participants

UNIVERSITY COLLEGE DUBLIN, NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF IRELAND, DUBLIN · DublinCoordinatorIreland
AECOM INFRASTRUCTURE & ENVIRONMENT UK LIMITED · BASINGSTOKE HAMPSHIREUnited Kingdom
Burgmann Packings Ltd · DublinIreland
COMSA SAU · BarcelonaSpain
Crack Ingenieria catalana S.L. · BarcelonaSpain
EQUIPOS NUCLEARES SA SME · MALIANOSpain
FULL SCALE DYNAMICS LIMITED · SheffieldUnited Kingdom
GREENWOOD ENGINEERING AS · BRONDBYDenmark
LLOYD'S REGISTER EMEA · LONDONUnited Kingdom
Microlise LimitedUnited Kingdom
OVE ARUP & PARTNERS IRELAND LIMITED · DublinIreland
PHI-MECA ENGINEERING · Cournon-D'AuvergneFrance
THE PROVOST, FELLOWS, FOUNDATION SCHOLARS & THE OTHER MEMBERS OF BOARD, OF THE COLLEGE OF THE HOLY & UNDIVIDED TRINITY OF QUEEN ELIZABETH NEAR DUBLIN · DublinIreland
THE UNIVERSITY OF NOTTINGHAM · NottinghamUnited Kingdom
TRL LIMITED · WokinghamUnited Kingdom
UNIVERSITAT POLITECNICA DE CATALUNYA · BARCELONASpain

TRUSS · Training in Reducing Uncertainty in Structural Safety

Results in brief

Training in Reducing Uncertainty in Structural Safety

Project objective

Participants

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