Globally, governments face the challenge of meeting modern transportation requirements including interconnectivity, reliability, safety and resilience of infrastructure networks.
Geotechnics of Transport Infrastructure
Green and resilient transport infrastructure
This includes the use of novel materials to meet environmental sustainability requirements to reducing urban heat island effects from transportation infrastructure.
This research theme focuses on fundamental and applied global and national research challenges on each stage of the modernised transportation life cycle from innovative design, novel materials, and modern construction technologies to accommodate increased traffic capacity while improving safety, stability and liveability standards.
Key focus areas
- Behaviour of roads and rail substructure including field, laboratory testing, and prototype physical modelling
- Advanced material characterisation and processing techniques
- energy-absorbing properties of track substructure
- use of marginal fills such as coal-wash and slag on lieu of natural aggregates
- particle interlocking via geogrids for improved stability
- effective ground improvement methods including vacuum consolidation, dynamic compaction, chemical treatment and bio-stabilisation.
- Realistically scaled tests in the laboratory and field combined with computational refinement to optimise and validate the structural design of components before they are constructed and operational.
- Contribute to the advancement, optimisation of design and construction techniques using modern computational analysis and simulation tools.
- Combine physical modelling and advanced simulations tools in tandem to enable effective risk assessment and reliability analysis to ensure enhanced safety of transportation systems, including hauling greater freight at higher speeds, integrating the superstructure and substructure elements.
Applications: (a) coal wash as road substructure and (b) use of geo-composite to stabilise rail track.