Engineering our transport and energy futures

For UTS Associate Professor Behzad Fatahi, the road to international research collaboration has been surprisingly straightforward.

Over the last five years, the Head of Discipline for Geotechnical and Transport Engineering has worked closely with researchers from Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU) and the Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IITM).

In both cases, Fatahi started out looking for specialist expertise to support projects he was working on. He identified two academics – Professor Jian-Hua Yin at PolyU and Associate Professor Subhadeep Banerjee at IIT Madras – as having the skills he was looking for.

But when he reached out to kickstart a research collaboration, he discovered that UTS had already established strategic partnerships with both institutions through the university’s Key Technology Partnerships (KTP) program. That meant the researchers could jump straight into the work.

When there is this platform between the two institutions which is already endorsed and all the formality is done, collaboration and moving the academics between different institutes, travelling and gaining access to each other’s facilities, I think it makes it much easier.

UTS Associate Professor Behzad Fatahi 

Building international networks

After receiving funding from the KTP Visiting Fellow program, Fatahi invited both collaborators out to visit UTS. Yin stayed for three weeks, partnering with Fatahi’s team on a large industry-funded project on the long-term settlement and performance assessment of roads. Banerjee, who came to work on an existing sponsored international collaborative project on the seismic design of critical infrastructure such as energy storage tanks, stayed for a month. 

These early visits were the launching pad for two highly successful research programs that now span a wide range of projects, publications and other initiatives. With Yin, these include a paper in Q1-ranked journal Geotextiles and Geomembrane, the joint supervision of two PhD students, and a $300,000 contract with EIC Activity for a project on ground improvement.

Recently, Fatahi and Yin completed a major industry contract for a project looking at the construction of roads on problematic soil. The project produced a model for the use of polymeric geosynthetics to stabilise the soil; this model is now available for use by industry partners including Transport for NSW, Fulton Hogan, SMEC and Menard Oceania.

Professor Yin brought international expertise directly related to the field.

He’s quite well known in geotechnical engineering and particularly long-term settlement prediction of infrastructure, so that was a great addition to the work.

UTS Associate Professor Behzad Fatahi

The collaboration with Banerjee led to the supervision of a joint PhD student, as well as a number of papers on seismic design. In 2020, Fatahi and Banerjee, in collaboration with colleagues at both institutes and the University of Manchester, convened an international webinar on natural disaster resilience for built infrastructure.

“This was during COVID, so there was a lack of face-to-face conferences around the world. We had 200-plus participants over a period of four days,” Fatahi says. 

And the work continues: the pair are now applying for funding via a DFAT-funded scheme that supports research collaborations between India and Australia.

A collaboration opportunity like no other

Both collaborations have expanded to include other academics from UTS, PolyU and IITM, as well as prospective partners from other institutions – during a trip to PolyU, Fatahi established new research relationships with PolyU’s collaborators from universities in Macau, Nanjing, Shanghai and Wuhan.

“I think the KTP program offers a lot of networks,” Fatahi says.

“It makes it much easier for people to integrate into each other’s institutes; basically, you feel you are a member of the other institute. It goes beyond one collaborator.”