A new £X million experimental flume will submerge scale models of bridges, dams, and wind turbines under combined waves, currents, and shifting sediments to test how they fail. Current testing methods typically examine only one stress at a time—waves alone, or currents alone. But in real rivers and coasts, infrastructure faces multiple forces simultaneously: a storm surge piles water against a bridge pier while scouring the riverbed from beneath. These compound effects are poorly understood, and climate change is making them more unpredictable. The resulting knowledge gap forces engineers to over-design structures (wasting money) or under-design them (risking catastrophic collapse). The REAL facility will integrate wave generators, sediment feeders, and tilting channels to reproduce these combined conditions at unprecedented scale and realism. If successful, it will allow researchers to develop new design standards for flood defences, offshore wind foundations, and port structures that are both more resilient and cheaper to build. The facility itself is a piece of engineering infrastructure—a tool for generating fundamental understanding of fluid-sediment-structure interactions. That understanding could eventually reshape how the UK builds and maintains the bridges, sea walls, and energy installations that keep its transport, power, and flood protection systems running.
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Lifeline infrastructure - for example, bridges, dams, flood defences, ports, marine wind farms etc - in river, costal or marine environments is subjected to complex loading regimes arising through combinations of hydrodynamic and geotechnical effects. River or tidal currents and waves may induce structural loadings and sedimentological and / or geotechnical responses that can ultimately lead to severe damage or structural failure. Changing patterns of climate and infrastructure use mean that the compound effect of potentially two or more destabilising mechanisms is becoming increasingly complex and difficult to predict. However, despite their critical role in the resilience of lifeline infrastructure systems, these complex interactions remain largely under-researched. The resulting lack of understanding may lead to unnecessary costs or preventable failure of vital pieces of infrastructure. The aim of this project is to develop REAL, a novel experimental facility that will revolutionise research in submerged infrastructure by enabling comprehensive multi-phenomena testing. Creation of this unique facility will require the purchase of equipment comprising a large tilting flume, systems for water pumping and storage, wave generation and absorption, sediment feeding, recirculation and separation and instruments for detailed measurement of water velocities. These systems will be fully integrated and automated to reproduce scenarios representative of real-world conditions at unprecedented levels of realism. The research enabled by the facility will pave the way to novel approaches to the design and construction of future infrastructure systems that are both resilient and cost effective.
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