Partners: Environment Agency, Canal & River Trust, Northern Ireland Water/Aecom, RSK Challenge: Our partners collectively own over 10,000km of water retaining earthworks (embankments/dams), which protect large areas of the UK from flooding. Recent effects of extreme weather on UK earthworks have highlighted their vulnerability to climate change with numerous failures reported across a range of infrastructure networks. Given that climatic variations are projected to become more extreme, developing and maintaining resilient infrastructure is essential to our partners and all UK geotechnical asset owners. Early identification of poor/deteriorating earthwork condition is essential for cost effective maintenance and prevention of hazardous and expensive failures. Current earthwork condition assessment practice is, however, usually based on visual observations with little/no information available on their underlying internal condition. This project will demonstrate an innovative geophysical approach, using seismic surface waves (SW), for non-invasively assessing internal earthwork condition, while also adapting the outputs to ensure compatibility with our partner's management systems. This approach will support asset management decisions, including, for example, maintenance prioritisation; selection/configuration of monitoring works and selection/targeting of interventions. The speed of SW data acquisition, high spatial coverage and relative low-cost of these measurements will remove key barriers to preventative management. Aims/Objectives: This project aims to translate the findings from a recent EPSRC project "GEOCARE" to asset owners/managers of water retaining earthworks that protect the UK from flooding. The objectives (O) and supporting activities (A) are: O) Demonstrate an innovative approach for assessing internal earthwork condition. A) SW data will be acquired at selected partner sites and will be used to derive 2D/3D asset condition models. O) Adapt this technology to ensure compatibility with our partners' management systems. A) Project staff will be seconded to each partner organisation for short periods in order to better understand their condition assessment practices, databases, and to optimise survey outputs to their requirements. Regular stakeholder meetings with our partners' will also ensure that scientific, engineering and information delivery developments are appropriate. O) Permanently embed this knowledge and capability within our project partners. A) In addition to secondments and stakeholder meetings, guidelines on the integration of SW into asset ranking, prioritisation and intervention planning will be written. O) Widely disseminate the project's technological outcomes. A) A workshop will be organised to showcase the project's technological outcomes to a wide audience. Results and recommendations will be further disseminated through a project website, articles in industry magazines and via a case study with CIRIA. Main Deliverables: 2D/3D voxelated condition models will be developed for each partner's site, to showcase SW technology (D1). This will enable early informed decisions on maintenance and remediation to be made, thereby removing a barrier to preventative management. These models will be integrated within our partner's management systems (D2) following consultation and secondments at each organisation. Guidelines on the use of SW outputs in condition assessment practice (D3) will be developed for each partner to further embed the knowledge. A workshop will be organised to showcase the project's technological outcomes and benefits to proactive asset management to a wide stakeholder audience (D4). Results and recommendations will be further disseminated through a project website (D5), articles in industry magazines (D6) and via publication of a case study with CIRIA (D7). Duration: 12 months Total cost: £139,866

Green and blue spaces (GI) can directly and indirectly influence human health and wellbeing. However, access to health and wellbeing benefits is not shared equally amongst the population, particularly in urban areas. Research shows that people aged 65 and over are most likely to suffer from poor health, yet this group may be the least likely to benefit from GI. Although good health and wellbeing in an ageing population might be promoted through access to GI, using GI may not always be beneficial particularly as older people can be more susceptible to environmental stressors. Understanding how GI is valued in the context of the health and wellbeing of older people is one such unknown. This value might include the monetary value of preventing ill-health but also broader interpretations, such as the historical, heritage or wildlife value that influences whether older people actively seek experiences in green and blue spaces. The GHIA research project; 'Green Infrastructure and the Health and Wellbeing Influences on an Ageing Population' aims to better understand the benefits and values of urban GI for older people and how GI and specific 'greening projects' can be best used to support healthy ageing in urban areas. The proposed case-study area is Greater Manchester (GM). GM is the first northern city to adopt a devolutionary settlement including control of health and social care spending. The research team are partnering with organisations involved in improving the health and wellbeing of older people and the design and management of GI across GM, including GM's Red Rose Forest, Public Health Manchester, Manchester City Council and Manchester Arts and Galleries Partnership. A core part of the research will look at how the research findings can be translated into policy and practice and the transferability of findings to other cities, potentially with similarly devolved powers. It will do this by involving older people as 'co-producers' of the research to better understand thoughts, experiences and values that are associated with green and blue spaces. This will have a particular arts focus, including storytelling, sensory engagement and offering new experiences for engaging with green and blue spaces. Different types of urban GI will be used, including green 'patches' within the city (e.g. urban parks), green and blue 'corridors' (e.g. canals and waterways) and green spaces within the wider urban fabric or 'matrix' (e.g. private gardens). This co-production of research findings will be linked to all the other areas of work undertaken in the project. Other aspects of research will be conducted on the potential benefits and disbenefits of green spaces on ageing health and wellbeing and the value that this provides. This will include looking for relationships between health data and the occurrence of GI across space, 'before and after studies' exploring the influence that different greening projects have on the physical activity of older people, measuring how GI may affect older people's exposure to environmental hazards (such as air pollution and extreme temperature) and working with people with early-onset dementia to understand how they appreciate the urban landscape through different 'sensory' perceptions. The findings from the other components of the research will then be used to explore the values applied to the GI benefits and how these can help guide policy and practice. This will include evaluating existing measures of valuing greenspace, including monetary valuation and then work with older people to understand broader interpretations of value, such as culture, heritage, history and the natural or 'biodiversity' value. These findings will be used to develop online mapping tools that demonstrate the needs, provision and value of GI for older people. The team will then work to explore how these findings relate to other locations and communicate findings to urban areas across the UK.

This project aims to develop a low cost ground imaging system (PRIME - Proactive Infrastructure Monitoring and Evaluation) for remote monitoring of infrastructure earthwork assets. PRIME will assess the condition of the earthworks on a continuous 24/7 basis, helping to predict failures and enable timely intervention. Conventional asset monitoring involves examining the surface (either by people on the ground or from aerial photos) and using point sensors, like moisture content and tilt meters, which only give information in the immediate vicinity of the sensor. But PRIME will use geophysics to 'see inside' the earthworks, enabling volumetric tracking of moisture content changes and ground movement, and so identifying problems at a much earlier stage. The development of PRIME is driven by the increasing rate and severity of infrastructure earthwork failures. This is due to aging assets (many canal and rail earthworks are over a hundred years old) and more extreme weather events (e.g. the extreme rainfall during winter 2013-14). Asset failures are enormously expensive, costing hundreds of millions of pounds per year in the UK alone, not to mention risks to human health and disruption of services, transport systems and the wider economy. There is growing recognition among asset owners, managers, and consultants that remote monitoring technologies have the potential to reduce these costs and risks by providing continuous condition information and early warnings of failure. To this end, low-cost PRIME hardware has already been successfully developed and demonstrated during a pilot phase project. But in an operational environment, the processing and interpretation of the large volumes of data that PRIME will produce must be automated for the technology to be commercially viable. Manual oversight of the systems simply would not be able to deliver cost-effective near real-time condition assessments and early warnings over extended monitoring periods. To address this, the project aims to develop a fully-automated data processing, image analysis and decision support system for PRIME. Methods already used in medical physics will be employed to recognise conditions likely to give rise to failure and will automatically generate alarms. The near real-time interpretation of the earthwork condition will be provided by an end-user interface (the dashboard), which will also enable PRIME information to be exported to, and interface with, industry-standard monitoring systems. The system will be validated at two test sites on operational rail and waterways infrastructure, and its development will be steered by a broad consortium of stakeholders to ensure that the technology is fit-for-purpose. Implementation of the PRIME information delivery system will represent a step-change in asset condition monitoring, providing high frequency subsurface information at unprecedented resolution. This will facilitate a powerful new approach to near-real-time decision-support and early warning, which will provide the information necessary to implement low-cost early interventions and avoid catastrophic very high cost infrastructure failures. Moreover, the development and commercialisation of PRIME will enable specialist consultants and technology companies to provide cutting edge services and monitoring solutions. By the end of the project, the aim is to have developed and demonstrated PRIME technology to a point where it is ready to be translated to the commercial sector. Stakeholders: Arup; Atkins; Network Rail; Canal and River Trust; Scottish Canals; National Grid; HS2; Rail Safety and Standards Board (RSSB); ITM Monitoring; GeoSense; Transport Scotland. Keywords: Remote monitoring; early warning; subsurface information; geophysical imaging; environmental risks; infrastructure condition.

Masonry arch bridges still form the backbone of the UK's transport infrastructure; approaching 50% of bridge spans on the UK rail and regional highway networks are masonry. However, a number of prominent failures suggest we may be at a tipping point - brought about by a perfect storm of the increasing age of the structures, new traffic loading demands, climate change effects pushing structures to new limits and severely restricted maintenance budgets. To respond to the challenging times ahead there is a need to develop a much greater understanding of how real bridges behave, moving beyond traditional 2D idealisations and identifying the extent to which bridges are capable of 'autogenously healing' under cycling loading. This is important as, currently, bridge engineers faced with a damaged bridge simply do not have the tools needed to make informed assessment decisions, and may needlessly strengthen or demolish a structure even if it could, in reality, be repaired at comparatively modest cost. The goal is to provide those responsible for the management of bridges with a powerful suite of analysis modelling tools and a robust overarching multi-level framework capable of being applied to the diverse population of masonry arch bridges in-service today (i.e. undamaged, damaged and repaired). To achieve this a team of experienced researchers with complementary expertise has been assembled. Medium and large-scale experimental tests will be used to develop and validate analysis tools of different levels of sophistication, with high-level, high-fidelity models, capable of simulating the actual masonry bond and material response, used to calibrate novel intermediate-level and lower-level tools suitable for rapid practical assessment.

Project Partners: Arup, Atkins, Canal & River Trust, Environment Agency, Geosense, High Speed Two, Highways England, ITM Monitoring, Kier, National Grid, Network Rail, Rail Safety & Standards Board, Scottish Canals, Transport Scotland. The Challenge: The development of the Proactive Infrastructure Monitoring and Evaluation (PRIME) system is driven by the increasing rate and severity of failures in flood defence, transportation, and utilities earthworks. This is due to aging assets (many canal and rail earthworks are over a hundred years old) and more extreme weather events (e.g. the extreme rainfall during winter 2013-14 & 2015-16). Asset failures are enormously expensive, costing hundreds of millions of pounds per year in the UK alone, not to mention risks to human health and disruption of transport systems, utilities and the wider economy. Assessment of the condition of geotechnical assets is essential for cost effective maintenance and prevention of hazardous failure events. Early identification of deteriorating condition generally allows low cost preventative remediation to be undertaken (post failure interventions are typically ten times more expensive) and reduces the risk of catastrophic failures. Conventional approaches to condition monitoring are often inadequate for predicting earthwork instability. They are heavily dependent on surface observations - i.e. walk-over surveys or airborne data collection. These approaches cannot detect the subsurface precursors to failure events; instead they identify failure once it has begun. There is growing recognition among infrastructure asset owners, managers, and consultants that automated monitoring technologies have the potential to reduce these costs and risks by providing continuous condition information and early warnings of failure. Aims & Objectives: The primary objective is to deliver a new remote condition monitoring and decision-support system for assessing the internal condition of safety critical geotechnical assets. This will be realised by implementing a fully automated software workflow for data analysis and information delivery, building upon the recently developed PRIME hardware platform. The integrated PRIME system (i.e. hardware & software) will combine emerging geophysical ground imaging technology with wireless telemetry, 'big data' handling, and web portal access. It will form the basis of a new generation of intelligent decision-support technology capable of 'seeing inside' vulnerable earthworks in near-real-time using diagnostic imaging methods routinely used in medical physics. By the end of this project, the software and hardware will be demonstrated to technology readiness level (TRL) 7 at new and existing stakeholder sites, ready for commercialisation and use by the wider stakeholder community. Benefits: The key benefits of PRIME to asset owners include cost savings through minimising unnecessary renewals and providing early warning of failure events, time savings associated with fewer manual site visits, and risk reduction by preventing dangerous earthworks failures, and minimising the need for people to enter potentially hazardous operational environments. Geotechnical monitoring providers, consultants & contractors will benefit through new cutting-edge geotechnical monitoring services and, for the first time, near-real-time volumetric subsurface monitoring information. Key Deliverables & Outputs: - New software to fully automate PRIME data processing and information delivery - including a web-based decision support dashboard. - Demonstration of the complete PRIME system at existing rail and waterways pilot sites, and new highways, power transmission and flood defence sites - establishing TRL 7 (demonstration in an operational environment). - A commercialisation strategy agreed with project partners to ensure technology translation to the stakeholder community. Duration: 18 months Cost: £183,000 (at 80% FEC)