The construction industry consumes around 400 million tonnes of materials every year, a quarter of all raw materials used in the economy. It also produces annually three times the amount of waste generated by all UK households combined. The industry produces 90 million tonnes of inert waste every year, and approximately 10% of UK carbon dioxide emissions are associated with the manufacture and transport of construction materials and the construction processes. It is therefore important that the construction industry changes the way it designs and builds to reduce its environmental impact and to enable the UK to meet its carbon dioxide reduction commitments. The main theme of this proposal is to achieve the goal of this initiative from the geotechnical aspects of building construction using the outcome of an EPSRC project Smart Foundations with Distributed Fibre Optics Technology (EP/D040000/1) . The project delivered the following research outcomes: (i) a foundation design tool that optimises the layout and geometries of foundations (both piles and raft), thereby minimising the use of construction materials while achieving similar building performance, (ii) a foundation design tool that considers reuse of existing foundations for new buildings, and (iii) an inexpensive optical fibre strain measurement system to ensure the foundation based on the optimised design is performing as predicted in both short- and long-terms. This follow-on project aims to commercialise the research outcomes by converting the complex algorithms developed on research-based platforms to more user-friendly formats so they can be used directly by the industry. It consists of the following two major efforts: (a) development of middleware that converts raw Optical Fibre Strain (OFS) data to engineering performance data and (ii) coding of the foundation design tool into C++. The expected outcome is an engineering software package that aids the design and optimisation analyses of new and reuse foundations, determines the need and optimum locations of foundation instrumentation, and converts raw OFS data into engineering data for short- and long-term monitoring endeavours.

Design limits are frequently based on strain developing in the structure. Although strain measurement is well established, current practice has until recently been restricted to measurement of point-wise strains by means of vibrating wire (VWSG) or metal foil strain gauges and more recently by fibre optics utilising Fibre Bragg Grating (FBG) technology. Where structures interact with soil, (e.g. underground infrastructure such as foundations, tunnels or pipelines) or indeed in the case of a soil structure (road or dam embankments), the state of the structure is not fully understood unless the complete in situ strain regime is known. In the context of monitoring strain in piled foundations, tunnels, pipelines, slopes or embankments, capturing the continuous strain profile is often invaluable to pinpoint localised problem areas such as joint rotations, deformations and non-uniformly distributed soil-structure interaction loads. In this project, we propose to use a unique fibre optics technology called the 'Brillouin optical time-domain reflectometer (BOTDR)'. The novel aspect of this new technology lies in the fact that tens of kilometres of fibre can be sensed at once for continuous distributed strain measurement, providing relatively cheap but highly effective monitoring systems. The system utilizes standard low cost fibre optics (potentially 0.1/m) and the strain resolution can go down to 2 micro strains. We will demonstrate the importance of distributed strain measurements to monitor the performance of building foundations at field sites in the UK and US. Using the distributed strain data, a design tool that optimises the performance of foundations that require rehabilitation, repair and reuse will be developed with industrial collaborators. The project has supports from UK Industrial partners as well US collaborators (National Science Foundation and Northwestern University).

UK construction is a multi-billion pound industry. While it is the most vital cog in the UK economy for creating physical assets, it is widely regarded as slow to innovate. High risks and the significant cost of mistakes promotes a level of conservatism which is much greater compared to other industries. Change therefore tends to be iterative and cautious. Supported by the UK Government through the implementation of various construction initiatives, such as 'Construction 2025' and 'Transforming Construction', the industry is beginning to embrace technology in a transformative way. The technological revolution is already under way for 'above-ground' construction activities, with modular construction and building information modelling being primary examples. One of the biggest obstacles to underground construction making similar gains is uncertainty surrounding how structures interact with soils during construction operations i.e. 'soil-structure interaction' (SSI). Soil-structure interaction plays a critical role in underground construction operations yet the tools that are used to predict them remain remarkably over-conservative. This is because predictive models for SSI are non-existent, over-simplified or are calibrated against measured data obtained from model-scale replicas of the process in the laboratory, essentially representing an 'ideal' soil-structure interface. The work described in this proposal will develop the underpinning engineering science for SSI design applied to underground construction. Laboratory testing and numerical modelling will be used to elucidate the mechanics of soil-structure interface behaviour such as the role of strain level, stress level and time on the development of soil-structure contact stresses and pore water pressures. Intelligent monitoring systems will be developed to measure and monitor soil-structure contact stresses on live construction projects to provide (i) field data for rigorous validation of developed design methods and (ii) real-time, automated feedback to site engineers to inform construction processes and provide 'early warning' of adverse responses. Recent advances in fibre optic sensing will be exploited to develop novel multi-directional contact stress sensors. The new sensors will alleviate limitations associated with traditional transducers such as excessive sensor flexibility (which actually influences the soil stress field the sensors are intended to measure) and immunity to electromagnetic noise and water damage. A multi-directional interface shear apparatus will be developed to validate the contact stress sensors and provide additional insight into the behaviour of an 'ideal' soil-structure interface in the laboratory. The monitoring system will employ machine learning algorithms in the form of Bayesian non-parametrics such that prior data from previous construction projects may be synthesised with newly-acquired data to provide a robust data-driven decision-making process. The monitoring system will be deployed on live construction projects in the UK alongside industry partners. A suite of new design methods tailored specifically for underground construction operations will be developed, informed by the field monitoring, laboratory testing and numerical modelling. Embracing the innovation and technology developed in this project will allow the construction industry to obtain and utilise intelligent and actionable data that can save time and money, and improve construction safety. This will contribute to the UK becoming a global hub for the rapidly growing market for construction-related services throughout the world.

Chalk is a highly variable soft rock that covers much of Northern Europe and is widespread under the North and Baltic Seas. It poses significant problems for the designers of large foundations for port, bridge and offshore wind turbine structures that have to sustain severe environmental loading over their many decades in service. Particular difficulties are faced when employing large driven steel piles to secure the structures in place. While driven pile foundation solutions have many potential advantages, chalk is highly sensitive to pile driving and to service loading conditions, such as the repeated cyclic buffeting applied to bridge, harbour and offshore structures by storm winds and wave impacts. Current guidance regarding how to allow for difficult pile driving conditions or predict the piles' vertical and lateral response to loads is notoriously unreliable in chalk. There is also no current industrial guidance regarding the potentially positive effects of time (after driving) on pile behaviour or the generally negative impact of the cyclic loading that the structures and their piled foundations will inevitably experience. These shortfalls in knowledge are introducing great uncertainty into the assessment and design of a range of projects around the UK and Northern Europe. Particularly affected are a series of planned and existing major offshore wind farm developments. The uncertainty regarding foundation design and performance poses a threat to the economic and safe harnessing of vital renewable, low carbon, offshore energy supplies. Better design guidelines will reduce offshore wind energy costs and also help harbour and transport projects to progress and function effectively, so delivering additional benefits to both individual consumers and UK Industry. The research proposed will generate new driven pile design guidance for chalk sites through a comprehensive programme of high quality field tests, involving multiple loading scenarios, on 21 specially instrumented driven tubular steel test piles, at an onshore test site in Kent. This will form a benchmark set of results that will be complemented by comprehensive advanced drilling, sampling, in-situ testing and laboratory experiments, supported by rigorous analysis and close analysis of other case history data. The key aim is to develop design procedures that overcome, for chalk, the current shortfalls in knowledge regarding pile driving, ageing, static and cyclic response under axial and lateral loading. The main deliverable will be new guidelines for practical design that will be suitable for both onshore and offshore applications.

Through the 2008 Climate Change act, the UK committed to reduce by 80% its carbon emissions. While great progress has been made so far, data suggests that reductions in emissions have been achieved through switching electricity production to greener, more environmentally friendly sources, such as offshore wind. Clearly, it is inevitable that, to achieve further reductions in carbon emissions, we need to look for improvements elsewhere, such as heating and cooling of buildings, which accounts for 25% of all UK final energy consumption and 15% of carbon emissions. Project SaFEGround aims to provide a template for reducing emissions associated to heating and cooling through the deployment of heat pumps. These are efficient devices capable of extracting heat from a storage medium, e.g. air for air-source heat pumps or the ground for ground-source heat pumps, and this is done with high efficiency, since for each unit of electricity consumed by the system, it is usual to get 3-4 units of heat. Clearly, these are more environmentally-friendly than boilers as they require only electricity, which, as mentioned above, is increasingly being generated from renewable and low-carbon sources. Therefore, SaFEGround will investigate how ground-source heat pumps can be coupled with civil engineering structures to deliver low-carbon heating and cooling in a sustainable, safe and efficient manner. To achieve this, SaFEGround will combine research on material science, heat pump technology, energy geotechnics, building energy systems modelling, whole-system modelling and finance, to demonstrate that ground source energy systems can play an important role in the UK's future low-carbon energy mix in a cost-effective manner.