Research at GEER Node and Future Directions

We offer expertise in Foundations for Infrastructure, Offshore Energy Cables and Foundations, Nanomaterials for Enhanced Building Materials, Ground/Soil Contamination, and Extreme Conditions. Our scope also includes sustainable development, water resource management, flood warning, disaster management, rebuilding soil health, land remediation, air quality control, water treatment, carbon capture and storage, computational hydraulics, hydrological modelling, sediment transport, contaminant transport, agent-based modelling, environmental impacts and uncertainty quantification.

Live Projects:

• Climate Adaptation Control Technologies for Urban Spaces (CACTUS): Developing "climate adaptation composite barrier systems" (comprising water holding layers and a capillary barrier) capable of limiting the impact of a changing environment on the geo-infrastructure and hence increasing their engineering sustainability and resilience.
• Martian Rammed Earth: Establish the feasibility and fundamental tools to build using rammed earth on Mars and lay a foundation for future research and development work investigating optimal structural forms and construction techniques for creating Martian structures and infrastructure.
• Developing a novel Climate change Risk Assessment Framework for cultural heritage in Turkey (CRAFT): Susceptibility mapping of cultural heritage to climate-change-driven hazards, with a particular focus on the floods and landslides hazards on Istanbul's world heritage sites
• Fungi-Biopolymer Synergistic Application in Soil Stabilisation: This research harnesses the synergy between fungi and biopolymers to develop innovative and sustainable soil stabilisation techniques. By combining expertise in geotechnics, biopolymers, and fungal biology, it seeks to explore how these natural materials interact to enhance soil strength and stability effectively.
• Predictive Rail Innovation for Supporting Maintenance: Developing a cutting-edge decision support system aimed at improving rail maintenance, specifically by optimising the allocation of rail cleaning interventions.

Prospective PhD Students:

• Impacts of climate change on the stability of infrastructure slopes (Contact Prof Hughes)
• Bio-based ground improvement methods (Contact Dr Muguda Viswanath and Prof Hughes)
• Applied AI for improving the sustainability and resilience of urban infrastructure (Contact Dr Gerami-Seresht)
• Approximate upper- and lower-bound analyses of translational rainfall-induced landslides in curvilinear hillslopes (Contact Dr Zhang)
• Building Information Modelling (BIM) for construction management and smart cities (Contact Dr Gerami-Seresht)
• Multiscale mechanical characterisation of granular materials under complex loading conditions (Contact Dr Petalas)
• Micro-to-macro scale soil mechanics in offshore geotechnical engineering (Contact Dr Petalas)