Joint Research Institute in Environmental, Infrastructure and Transportation Engineering

The JRI will, together with its collaborators in the Telford Institute from across Scotland, tackle key technological issues relating to infrastructure, transportation and environment. The JRI is structured around three specific themes interlaced by interdisciplinary cross-cutting threads that add further dimensions to the proposed research activities.

The first theme will address technological challenges associated with infrastructure and the environment. Research within this theme will focus on two broad areas. The first of these is waste, pollution, health and biotechnology and the second is fluvial and coastal processes, flooding and flood defence infrastructure. Key challenges include the development of effective tools and techniques for sustainable waste and pollution management, for coastal and fluvial flood risk management and for other aspects of river management. This is set against a background of thousands of kilometres of existing infrastructure (often aging and of uncertain condition), ever-increasing pressure from human developments and predictions of significant climate change for the future.

The second theme will address the provision of sustainable ground and marine based transportation systems. Research on ground based transportation will focus on sustainable mobility, which can only be achieved by increasing the efficiency of the transport system, reducing transport intensity and ensuring an equitable distribution of both the opportunities and the impacts of the transportation system. Similarly, the JRI will explore opportunities for increased efficiency, safety and sustainability of maritime transport through technological and managerial innovations. A key area will be research related to the prediction of the safety of ships once they have been damaged by collision, grounding, structural failure or other extreme events.

The third theme will address the technologies underlying the future development of a growing aerospace industry that is now, more than ever, playing a major role in societal infrastructure and transportation. There are significant environmental demands on aircraft noise, pollution and fuel efficiency that can only be met by significant advances in design and innovative operations management. At the same time, there is a drive towards the development of unmanned aerial vehicles for military and civil applications as wide ranging as penetration into polluted environments and mobile surveillance. Finally, driven on by the demands of the telecommunications industry and depletion of the earth’s mineral reserves, there is renewed interest in the exploration and exploitation of space. These issues provide the focus for research activities in this theme.