Industrial secondment stimulates new research

Dr Paul Greening of University College London (UCL)’s Department of Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering spent a six month Royal Academy of Engineering-supported Industrial Secondment with Arup’s Advanced Research Group. He reports some of his experiences here.

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Finite Element Model of an Opera House

After seven years as a lecturer at UCL I decided the time was right to grasp the nettle and apply for the Royal Academy of Engineering’s Industrial Secondment Award. My aim was to update my knowledge of state-of-the-art industrial practices with a view to refocusing my efforts in research and teaching and bringing my research to the forefront of the industry, thus facilitating academia-industry knowledge transfer.

In practice my period with Arup provided a far richer experience than I had expected as I had the opportunity to get involved in and make an input to a wide range of demanding projects.

A significant amount of my time was spent on suggesting and validating modifications to a sophisticated concrete material model that was incorporated into a finite element code. This resulted in an improved understanding of how in-service loading of concrete structures can change the way they vibrate, as well as a reliable means of predicting the dynamic behaviour of reinforced concrete. This part of the work involved the modelling of a hospital floor and provided explanations for the reasons of the discrepancies between the predicted and recorded structural vibrations. It is my intention to continue this thread of work through both undergraduate and postgraduate research students. The results of this work were submitted for presentation at the World Congress on Earthquake Engineering. I was also involved in using the concrete model for the analysis of an opera house structure with the complex geometry illustrated in the figure.

My work involved the validation of the material model against available empirical data. Since the location of the opera house is seismically active, I was also involved in analysing the effect of an earthquake on the structure and in justifying the optimization and performance based design technique to the stakeholders. This project resulted in an animation of the structure moving, cracking, yielding in some places – but remaining life-safe – even after an earthquake of a rare intensity.

These headline results indicate only a part of what I gained from the secondment. The secondment, for example, has already spawned several undergraduate research projects and many more will follow. Former colleagues at Arup are also offering their teaching and/or mentoring services to UCL students.

From a personal perspective, the secondment has renewed my enthusiasm for the subjects I teach and improved my credibility as a teacher of future engineers!

For further information on the Industrial Secondment Scheme please contact Dr Imren Markes at The Royal Academy of Engineering (020 7766 0600; E-mail imren.markes@raeng.org.uk). For further information on this work please contact Dr Paul Greening at UCL (020 7679 2718; E-mail paul.greening@ucl.ac.uk).