Shrink-swell clay soils already cost the UK economy over £1.6 billion in drought years, and climate change is making the problem worse by intensifying both wet and dry extremes. This project develops composite barrier systems—layers of water-holding material and capillary barriers—that can be buried beneath roads, railways, foundations, and buried utilities to buffer the ground against rapid changes in moisture and temperature. The core challenge is that soil behaviour under weather extremes is a complex interaction between plants, atmosphere, and ground chemistry that current engineering standards do not account for. The researchers will build physical models and run numerical simulations to test how these barriers perform under realistic extreme weather events and long-term climate shifts. If successful, the technology could be deployed across urban geo-infrastructure to reduce maintenance costs, prevent service disruptions, and extend the lifespan of transport networks and building foundations without requiring major redesign of existing structures.
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Climate change is causing, and will continue to cause, more intense precipitation events and greater amplitude of warm and cold temperatures leading to severe flooding, extreme drying, freezing and thawing. This will affect many parts of the urban geo-infrastructure such as shallow foundations, retaining structures, buried utilities, road subbase and railway formations. The costs of damage due to shrink/swell movements on clay soils have resulted in economic losses of over £1.6 billion in the UK during drought years. The novelty of the proposed research is the development of "climate adaptation composite barrier systems" (comprising water holding layers and a capillary barrier) capable of limiting the impact of a changing environment on the geo-infrastructure and hence increasing their engineering sustainability and resilience. Environmental cyclic actions imposed on our infrastructure are governed by soil-plant-atmosphere interaction, which is a coupled thermo-hydro-mechanical problem driven by the atmosphere and influenced by soil type, stress history, stress level, mineralogy, soil-water chemistry and vegetation. Understanding this complex problem requires systematic research and a coherent approach. This proposal describes systematic experimental and numerical modelling studies to understand the response of composite barrier systems, when subjected to extreme weather events and long-term climate changes, and to develop appropriate sustainable adaptation technologies to mitigate potential impacts on urban geo-infrastructure.
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