Distinction in Civil and Environmental Engineering

Dr Numa Joy Bertola was awarded Distinction in Civil and Environmental Engineering by EPFL in recognition for his outstanding PhD thesis that was completed at the Future Cities Laboratory (FCL). In his thesis, he presented new ways to design measurement systems for existing civil infrastructure, in view of the challenges posed by evolving function requirements, ageing and climate change.

Civil infrastructure often has hidden reserve capacity because of the conservative approaches used in construction design and practice. Knowledge of the structural behaviour, such as the maximal load-bearing capacity of a bridge, could ultimately improve the management of infrastructure.

However, while the information collected through sensor measurements has the potential to improve this knowledge, the translation of this information into knowledge is often not fully exploited. The design of the monitoring system is therefore crucial in determining what information is collected during load testing and how it is translated into an improved understanding of structural behaviour.

In external page Measurement-system design for structural identification, Dr Bertola presented new algorithms to design measurement systems of existing civil infrastructure, incorporating data collected through sensors to improve knowledge of the structural behaviour. The new methods are meant to either maximize the information gain of a sensor configuration or recommend an optimal solution based on multiple conflicting performance criteria. In addition, a methodology is introduced to assess whether information obtained through monitoring would influence decisions on asset management.

In this work, results on three full-scale bridges and one excavation site have shown that an optimal measurement-system design leads to better understandings of the structural behaviour.

Dr Bertola’s research was supervised by Prof. Ian Smith from EPFL’s Applied Computing and Mechanics Laboratory (IMAC), as part of of the Cyber Civil Infrastructure research project at FCL. The FCL alumni is currently working on new diagnostic tools and innovative maintenance strategies to retrofit damaged bridges as a post-doctoral fellow at EPFL in the Laboratory for Maintenance and Safety of Structures (MCS).