November 18, 2014
Transport and energy workshop to bridge technical gap in national infrastructure
Australian engineers must overcome significant design and construction challenges posed by some of the Earth’s least favourable soil conditions before high-speed rail is a cost-effective reality, a University of Wollongong (UOW) rail expert has said.
Professor Buddhima Indraratna, from UOW’s Centre for Geomechanics and Railway Engineering (CGRE), said technical solutions to unfavourable ground conditions in Australia will be discussed at the first national Workshop on Transport & Energy Infrastructure, hosted by CGRE and the ARC Centre of Excellence of Geotechnical Science and Engineering on Wednesday 19 November.
The workshop will gather leading experts from industry and academia involved in the design, construction, maintenance and repair of rail, road and energy infrastructure. It will also provide an opportunity for engineers in the early stages of their careers keep up to date with the latest developments in the field.
Professor Indraratna said the workshop was timely given Australia’s growing population and its increasing demands for road and rail transport and energy infrastructure. Urban areas are often expanding to land areas, posing significant construction difficulties such as high compressibility, erodible and collapsible characteristics, as well as increased cost of construction.
“When it comes to the question of high-speed rail, we can’t simply take infrastructure designs from France or Germany where they have excellent quality soil,” he said. “Most of the Australian population lives along the coastal belt, which is perhaps the most challenging environment on the planet for heavy rail transport and energy infrastructure.
“The ground along the Australian east coast contains soft clay deposits that under load suffer from excessive settlement and sinking, have a low load-bearing capacity and can move significantly under dynamic loads. These major technical challenges must be overcome before we can tackle the economic, social and political issues.”
Over the past 15 years, Professor Indraratna and his fellow researchers at UOW have developed numerous methods of simulating transport corridors including rail tracks, under high dynamic and impact loads.
The research, including pioneering work in prefabricated vertical drains and vacuum preloading, has been applied to major port reclamation and coastal ground improvements for passenger and freight rail infrastructure projects throughout Australia.
Professor Indraratna said in addition to the technical challenges, ground improvement costs were a significant barrier to high-speed rail on the east coast, as well as for various energy infrastructure such as pipelines.
“We still don’t have comprehensive engineering codes to guide engineers in designing this sort of infrastructure in poor ground conditions,” he said. “We have to develop our own expertise locally for the simple reason that nobody has done detailed engineering design for high speed load conditions, so we have to customise and make our own solutions.”
“That is a major challenge and workshops like this are a vital platform to disseminate the most recent research and field advances to the engineering community.”
Professor Indraratna’s research team was recently awarded a $1.2 million Federal Government Linkage grant, the biggest ever awarded to UOW’s Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences, to solve problems with soft clay along Australia’s coast, which creates challenges in designing and building transport infrastructure such as rail lines.
This together with an Australian Research Council Linkage Infrastructure, Equipment and Facilities (LIEF) grant totalling $1.7 million will help build arguably the world's best high-speed rail testing facility affiliated to UOW’s SMART Infrastructure Facility.
Media contact
Grant Reynolds, UOW Media &PR Officer, +61 417 010 350 or grantr@uow.edu.au.