My secondment at EIFFAGE

Hello everyone,

As I have mentioned in my last post, currently I am living in Paris!

I have moved here for three months to join EIFFAGE for my secondment within INFRASTAR project.

In here, I am working on new high speed railway connection in England - HS2.
My task is to optimize structures originally designed with concrete and steel by use of UHPFRC. In this way, we can save money, time, raw materials... and build the railway line from 21st century.

This is a great opportunity to see how the UHPFRC market looks like in reality and face problems that might be encountered while applying this novel material.

And, of course, to spend some time around the beautiful Eiffel tower ;)

Wish me luck!

The busiest period of doctorate(?)

Hello everyone,
As you can see, I didn't update this blog for some time... due to lack of time.

I am currently in mid-way of my PhD, 2.5 years past and 1.5 years left (among which 6 months will be still within the INFRASTAR project). This means that a) my experimental campaign is running at full speed, and b) I am starting to have first valuable results from both laboratory tests of R-UHPFRC and field monitoring of bridges.

Thus, I should be in multiple places at the time... To show you briefly how it looks like in practice, here is a brief overview of my agenda:

-6 weeks ago today, I have been in USA, where I was presenting first results of my experimental campaign on the conference UHPC 2019
-5 weeks ago, I have been working on the preparation of the journal paper about monitoring of Chillon viaduct
-4 weeks ago, I've been in the lab, preparing the static test of one of my beams (with use of fibre optics and DIC)
-3 weeks ago the INFRASTAR implementation day took place, thus I was visiting Copenhagen
-2 weeks ago, I've been preparing another static test in the lab
-a week ago, I've been working in the lab on the fatigue test
-and right now, I am on the train from Paris (where I have just started my secondment at EIFFAGE, more news soon) to Lausanne, to take care of my fatigue test and some personal stuff...

And, this shall continue more-less until the end of this year.

The good thing is that everything is rolling, so next year I hope to be more free in terms of affairs and able to work exclusively on the results of the fatigue tests.

That's it for now, stay tuned!