The 21/22 academic year has been very fruitful for Building Resilient, particularly with the start of the ERC Endure project in January 2022.
Last September, the team was present at the SAHC2021 congress held in Barcelona, with four presentations and a Keynote lecture by José M. Adam. We also participated in the CMMoST 2021 “6th International Conference on Mechanical Models in Structural Engineering” held in Valladolid in early December.
In December we applied for the PONT3 project, which is now to be funded according to the published provisional resolution. This project is an important challenge for the group, as the aim is to analyse the failure mechanisms of bridges in order to achieve effective predictive maintenance.
The Endure project started in January with the work of the postdoctoral researchers Nirvan Makoond and Manuel Buitrago together with the Principal Investigator José M. Adam. Subsequently, pre-doctoral researchers Giacomo Caredda, Diego Cetina and Lorenzo Marín also joined the team together with our Grants Manager, Marina Oliver.
In March, the team travelled to the University of Surrey to define a comprehensive work plan for WP1 with our collaborators Juan Sagaseta and Marios Chryssanthopoułos. The stay in Surrey allowed the team to delve deeper into aspects of the project related to risk assessment. This enabled 4 sub-projects to be defined within the framework of WP1 to be developed over the next two years.
Continuing with the Endure project, in June we had the pleasure of holding the project’s first workshop, entitled “Preventing structural failure propagation”. Renowned experts in progressive collapse and structural engineering from all over the world participated in the event, including Rigoberto Burgueño, Jason Ingham, Luca Pelà, Antoni Cladera, David Stevens, Itsaso Arrayago, Uwe Starossek and Bing Li. The two days of work shared with them proved to be truly beneficial for the progress of the project.
In addition, we still had some time left to construct the test building for the PREBUST project, which was built with prefabricated elements between February and April. Three tests have already been carried out on the building, during which an edge or corner column was suddenly removed. This allowed the robustness of precast concrete structures subjected to extreme events to be analysed on a real scale, achieving very satisfactory results.
In February, José M. Adam participated in the last workshop of the SAFEWAY project, with a presentation and a special session on “Excellent Science”. In May, José M. Adam and Nirvan Makoond gave two presentations on structural robustness at the FAILNOMORE project workshop in Barcelona.
At the end of June, the Building Resilient team attended the Structural Faults and Repair & European Bridge Conference 2022 in Edinburgh and the VIII International Congress of the Spanish Association of Structural Engineering (ACHE) in Santander.
It is worth highlighting the competitive Juan de la Cierva Incorporación and Juan de la Cierva Formación contracts awarded to Manuel Buitrago and Ana Sánchez respectively, as well as the work of Eduard Mezquida and the research stays of Fabio Parisi and Santiago López.
Finally, we should also mention our work with various companies that we have supported on business innovation issues and with whom we hope to continue working on new projects.
Therefore, we believe that the team will have a well-deserved holiday in order to return to the 22/23 academic year with more strength to face the research work into the robustness of structures that lie ahead, both in Endure and projects already underway as well as in new projects that may arise in collaboration with companies or in the academic environment.
