By Paul Gorman
The importance of knowing what is happening under the surface is paramount for the resilience of structures above ground.
That’s the advice from Seequent Segment Director, Civil, Pat McLarin.
‘If you learn something about the ground, you need to inform the other people on the project in order to build that resiliency. And if something changes on the project, you need to understand what that means in the context of the ground so you can validate, “are we going to be able to cope with this change or do we need to change the design?”.
‘Building the data in the subsurface, and that subsurface understanding, helps you be resilient.’
He cited an example of remediation work carried out on a warehouse which was subsiding because of a lack of understanding of the ground it was built on.
Subsequent analysis of the subsurface enabled repair work on the structure while it was still operating, effectively reducing the carbon footprint of the repair by 44%.
‘That’s resiliency, because they are adapting to the change,’ McLarin said.
Another example of resilience and changing specifications to incorporate new data was work by Sener on the longest bridge in Latin America, the 12.4km-long Salvador-Itaparica Bridge in Brazil.
‘They are integrating the data from all sorts of sources, reducing their modelling time by 30%. There’s more changes coming – the design is happening concurrently with the site investigation.’