Multi-hazard events, characterized by the simultaneous, cascading, or cumulative occurrence of multiple natural hazards, pose a significant threat to human lives and assets. This is primarily due to the cumulative and cascading effects arising from the interplay of various natural hazards across space and time. However, their identification is challenging, which is attributable to the complex nature of natural hazard interactions and the limited availability of multi-hazard observations.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFElastomeric bearings are widely used in bridges to support the superstructure, to transfer loads to substructures, and to accommodate movements induced by, for example, temperature changes. Bearing mechanical properties affect the bridge's performance and its response to permanent and variable loadings (e.g.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe Internet of things concept empowered by low-cost sensor technologies and headless computers has upscaled the applicability of vibration monitoring systems in recent years. Raspberry Shake devices are among those systems, constituting a crowdsourcing framework and forming a worldwide seismic network of over a thousand nodes. While Raspberry Shake devices have been proven to densify seismograph arrays efficiently, their potential for structural health monitoring (SHM) is still unknown and is open to discovery.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFScour jeopardises the safety of many civil engineering structures with foundations in riverbeds and it is the leading cause for the collapse of bridges worldwide. Current approaches for bridge scour risk management rely mainly on visual inspections, which provide unreliable estimates of scour and of its effects, also considering the difficulties in visually monitoring the riverbed erosion around submerged foundations. Thus, there is a need to introduce systems capable of continuously monitoring the evolution of scour at bridge foundations, even during extreme flood events.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe exposure of critical infrastructure to natural and human-induced hazards has severe consequences on world economies and societies. Therefore, resilience assessment of infrastructure assets to extreme events and sequences of diverse hazards is of paramount importance for maintaining their functionality. Yet, the resilience assessment commonly assumes single hazards and ignores alternative approaches and decisions in the restoration strategy.
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