Monday 30 January 2017

Introduction of the TRUSS project to the University of Nottingham students

Hello fellows!

I hope you are doing well.
In the last post, we discussed the new challenges of the new year, and we have some great news!!

Firstly, I have worked at AECOM in the last months in order to perform my secondment. During these months, some really interesting results have been achieved and I am going to post them soon. Trust me, very soon!

Then, during November 2016 a new research group has been launched by the university of Nottingham, the Resilience engineering research group (RERG), which is the group where I am working right now. In order to introduce the RERG to the university staff members and students, a workshop was organized on the 9th of November.

4 Academics, 11 research fellows and 16 PhD students compose the operative brain of the RERG group, that aim to develop innovative and efficient methods for asset management, system monitoring (fault detection and diagnosis, prognostic methods), reliability, safety and risk analysis of systems.

The presentation of the group has been held at the conference center of the University of Nottingham on the 9th of November 2016. There, I gave a 20 minutes talk introducing the TRUSS project by explaining its goals, partners, beneficiaries and research programs around Europe. Then, I explained the goals of my PhD (http://trussitn.eu/research/rail-and-road-infrastructure/esr9/) by showing a case study, which has been developed during the first year of the PhD and that will be presented at two conferences during the next months. The audience was mainly formed by students and academics of the University of Nottingham.

Presenting at the RERG workshop

Finally, I would like to give you a quick preview of the next posts:

1. one post will discuss the results of the secondment explaining the reason why I worked on the monitoring of a railway tunnel. Yes, I know, a tunnel is different from a bridge, and my PhD analyses  railway bridges. However, we develop mathematical methods, and Mathematics does not care about the nature of the data, She (meaning her majesty the Mathematics) can assess the health state of every kind of system (or infrastructure) by simply analyzing a continuous flow of data, which are provided by a monitoring system installed on the infrastructure of interest.

2. in another post, I am going to talk about my experience as inspector of a railway bridge during a visual inspection program of a 170-years old railway bridge!

That's all folks!!
Thanks for reading!