Sandra Pinto, a researcher from the Civil Research Group, has been granted a Studentship for Doctoral Research by FCT (Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia). This grant will support her research project titled "Experimental and numerical techniques for health monitoring of pavement infrastructure using embedded bender elements".
Pavement monitoring solutions must be extended from the inspection of the asphalt courses to include pavement’s foundation (subgrade, capping) and granular courses (sub-base and base). Failure of the foundation and granular courses will inevitably compromise the pavement and is much harder to detect visually than the damage of the asphalt courses.
The deterioration of the shear modulus of geomaterials is an important indicator of their distress. In the laboratory, the shear modulus has been measured using bender elements, but their extension to field applications is yet in its infancy.
The FCT Project INTENT (2022.06879.PTDC) will develop a new generation of field bender elements and install them in an experimental road section. Aligned with the INTENT Project, this programme develops advanced numerical techniques for the optimisation of the field bender element sensors, efficient automatic interpretation of their output signal, and supervised structural health monitoring of the pavement infrastructure.
