ROSEHIPS: Revolutionising Operational Safety and Economy for High-value Infrastructure using Population-based SHM

ROSEHIPS

What We Do

Healthy infrastructure is critical in ensuring the continued health of UK society and the economy. Unfortunately, monitoring and maintaining our buildings and transport network is expensive. Considering bridges, inspection is usually carried out visually by human experts.

There are not the resources to carry out the inspections as often as desired, or to make any repairs as quickly as needed; in the UK a backlog of maintenance works, identified in 2019, will cost £6.7bn.

When resources are stretched, mistakes can be made, sometimes with tragic consequences; in 2018, despite warnings about possible problems, the Morandi Bridge in Genova, Italy, collapsed at a cost of 43 lives. Collapse is not the only problem; extreme weather events driven by climate change can test the performance of infrastructure beyond its limits e.g. consider the cost and inconvenience caused by bridge closures forced by flooding.

Bridges are only one concern. The offshore wind (OW) sector has driven down energy costs and increased power output, and now pioneers a global change to clean energy. The UK leads globally in OW energy, with ~8 GW of capacity, expected to exceed 25 GW by 2030, providing almost one third of the UK’s annual electricity demand and helping meet the Climate Change Act’s (2008) difficult 2050 target for an 80% cut in UK carbon output.