07 – Multi-Functional Transport Infrastructures Training Week, Paris/Nantes – France, Monday 21th to Friday 27th of January 2019

 SMARTI Fellows ... Winter has come ... keep walking ... never look back .! 

Hello word...!!

Before we get into the main topic of the post, I would like to thank you all, pavement lovers, because we are now getting closer to pass the first milestone of the blog. We are approaching the 2,000 views and I am extremely pleased to tell you that there are viewers from all over the word, from Chile to New Zealand. Next milestone is to double the viewings before the end of the year so I count on you to make it happen.!

Well, let’s get back on “track”. On this occasion, I will be taking you to two of the most beautiful cities that Europe has, Paris and Nantes. As part of our training activities, the SMARTI ETN Consortium met once again for the third training week. The theme was Multi-Functional Transport Infrastructure and the locations for the meetings could not be better. In Paris, we were at  The École Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées (National School of Road and Bridges). This well-known and prestigious school is one of the oldest in France and for a pavement engineer such as myself, a dream come true. The school was created in 1747 under the name of École Royale des Ponts et Chaussées by Daniel-Charles Trudaine, Civil Engineer and one of the primary developers of the present French road system. On Wednesday afternoon, we travelled to Nantes to visit The French Institute of Science and Technology for Transport, Development and Networks (IFSTTAR), some of you might remember them from a previous post.

I could not resist to take a "selfie" at the entrance of such a prestigious School.

Every time that we, Early Stage Researchers (ESR), get together, we start by doing a group activity called “speed-dating” where we have the opportunity to put everyone up-to-date in the development of our projects. This time, Ana Jimenez del Barco Carrion who is the Project Manager, have a brilliant idea and grouped the researchers with similar projects or visions which to me made more sense when discussing progress and difficulties. As a result, we have managed to collaborate between ourselves and send an abstract call “Towards more sustainable Pavement Management practices using embedded sensor technologies” submitted to Infrastructure Open Access Journal under the SMARTI Special Issue. We all saw it as an opportunity to create conscience and see how our research life’s will continue once this wonderful experience comes to and end. So far, we are still having meetings and we have agreed on finishing the paper by the end of summer.

During our stay in Paris, we had a guide visit to “Sense-City”, a 9 million euros Facility for ANR’s Future Investment Program. Sense-City is a state-of-the-art climate chamber that can cover two 400m² areas (mini-city) equipped with sensors to study the performance of facilities and urban materials, monitor the city of tomorrow by sending appropriate information, and study air, water and soil pollution. We had a live demonstration on different projects but the most impressive was to see how they can simulate the sun-hours and its effect on the roads/houses/air/vegetation. One of the things that other fellows and I discussed was on the effect that this type of research has on the environment. We understand that in order to create something new, it needs to be studied and proved, but some of us believed that there was an excessive use of resources. Nonetheless, we hope the project keeps evolving and we look forward to seeing the results in the near future. Equally interesting was the presentation on Nano-technology and its use on civil engineering applications. SMARTI ESR-2 works with its solution and if you have been following my research will find some similarities.

With an old friend, Søren Rasmussen, from Dynatest Denmark and our guided visit to Sense-City.

In order to warm-up things, we had an internal competition called “Infra-hackathon”. We were asked to present a solution to a current mobility problem where we needed to increase the number of travellers without increasing the number of cars. Also, we needed to find a way to finance the project as there was not budget from central government and adding tolls was not an option. Wind energy harvesting was the most popular option among the groups as a way to make the infrastructure self-powered as well as smart barriers for traffic distribution. I guess the objective was to make the ESR’s think on how current infrastructure could be transformed to serve more than one purpose in the future.

The challenge: Infra-hackathon. Thanks Emmanuel.!

Finally, we had a guided visit to IFSTTAR Nantes where the concept Accelerated Pavement Testing (APT) was presented to us. Pier Hornych, LAboratory for Modelling, Experimentation and Survey of transport infrastructures (LAMES), introduced the Fatigue Carrousel and walked us through the process of designing, constructing, measuring, and modelling an APT experiment which was a lifetime experience for some of the ESR’s, specially for those who work/love pavement engineering. Personally, it was an enrichment experience to have a third visit to the carrousel and a motivation/challenge to promote this type of research back in my home country, Ecuador.   

Pier Hornych and Juliette Blanc walking us though the concept of APT.

SMARTI ETN group photo during our visit to the Fatigue Carrousel.

Well my beloved pavement lovers, I guess it’s time to end this post but keep in touch for more exciting news on the development of my project...!

Mario Manosalvas Paredes.

06 – Smart Transport Alliance (STA) Annual Conference, Brussels – Belgium, Tuesday 27th November

Figure 1. hey, watch out.! post in progress 😉

Hello word...!!

On this occasion, I will be writing a short post about the session that we, SMARTI ETN group, had last November (2018) in Brussels under the Smart Transport Alliance (STA) Annual Conference. As usual, I will start by giving a general overview of what STA is and does. The Smart Transportation Alliance is a not-for-profit global collaborative platform for transportation infrastructure innovation across modes and the Smart City. It was founded in December 2014 with headquarters in Brussels (Belgium) and meets every year; technical round-tables and training workshops are also organized by STA but with non-specific time frame. Finally, it should be highlighted that STA focus on providing smart infrastructure to connect people and business in a safe and sustainable way acknowledging that infrastructure competes with other important aspects of the public budget.

During our group presentation, each of the 15-fellows had 5-minutes to pitch their project to the audience. Below you can find my scrip and presentation. 

Figure 2. SmartEcoPave pitch

“We all make assumptions. We do it all the time. These assumptions can be about pretty much anything. Some assumptions are trivial and other are potentially devastating. Assumptions are guess based on three things: our imagination, past experience or wishful thinking; the problem with making assumptions is that more often than not, we are wrong and therefore, a lot of damage can be done by confusing our assumptions with the truth.

Pavement engineering has been driven by making assumptions since its origins. In 1876, Boussinesq introduced his method for homogeneous half space. In 1943 and 1945, Burmister developed a solution to calculate stresses and displacements in a two and three layer pavement system, respectively. Finally, in 1949 Odemark developed an approximate method to calculate stresses and strains in multilayer pavement systems. Nowadays, end of 2018, we (Pavement Engineers) are still making assumptions. In terms of designing a new pavement, we assume about the pavement model, the layer properties, travel speed, loading, climate, permissible stresses and strains, transfer functions and as a result, we will obtain the assumed future performance. What this really means is that we simply do not know what is happening with our structure. Generally, pavement design focus on two parameters, longitudinal strain at the bottom of the asphalt and the vertical strain at the top of the subgrade. I am going to talk about the longitudinal strain at the bottom of the asphalt. It is known that low strains are indicators of a good condition and vice-versa right? Most of the time we even prove these hypotheses in the laboratory and we felt like our design will last its design period. Unfortunately, this rarely occur in reality and the reason why is because we do not know how strains evolve with time but we could not know if we only have two points.

What if I tell you know that the scatter between the assumptions made at the office and the real pavement responses could be reduced? My name is Mario Manosalvas Paredes, I work for University of Nottingham and within my research project, we are studying a new type of low-cost battery less piezoelectric sensor that could measure and storage the longitudinal strain over time allowing pavement engineers either to validate their designs or to correct initial assumptions. We believe that once our sensor has been embedded in the asphalt, we will understand what is the real trend of the longitudinal strain and as a results of that, we will be able to determine the real performance of the structure.

Understanding whether or not our pavement will perform based onto our initial assumptions is not the ultimate goal that this project has. However, it is the fundamental one. Programming maintenance events based on the actual performance of the pavement and not just in time will allow road owners to allocate their budgets wiser. Thank you.!

I hope you liked the scrip guys. Stay tuned and see you soon pavement lovers!

Mario Manosalvas Paredes.