Please find below the text for three announcements regarding fully funded PhD positions available at Loughborough University, UK. These positions are part of our prestigious Vice Chancellor’s PhD Cluster – RAINDROP (Resilient eArthwork INfrastructure: Diagnosis, RehabilitatiOn & Prognosis), which focuses on enhancing the resilience of earthwork infrastructure to climate change – https://www.lboro.ac.uk/research/clusters/raindrop/.
Position 1: Soil micro-structure evolution during deterioration driven by environmental cycles
Project Details: Deterioration of earthworks slopes (cuttings and embankments), which support transport infrastructure and act as flood defences, is accelerating under increasing weather extremes resulting from global change, damaging critical infrastructure resilience – Soil micro-structure evolution during deterioration driven by environmental cycles | Postgraduate study | Loughborough University
This PhD project aims to advance understanding of how environmental (weather) cycles drive deterioration in geomaterials. A particular focus will be on the soil micro-structure evolution and how this links to macro-scale behaviour, using advanced laboratory tests, imaging techniques, and computer simulations. The outcomes will support the development of strategies to mitigate these deterioration processes and improve the resilience of geotechnical infrastructure.
Position 2: Advanced sensing and AI-driven diagnostics for earthwork condition assessment and deterioration detection
Project Details: Deterioration of earthworks slopes (cuttings and embankments), which support transport infrastructure and act as flood defences, is accelerating under increasing weather extremes resulting from global change, damaging critical infrastructure resilience – Advanced sensing and AI-driven diagnostics | Postgraduate study | Loughborough University
Current earthworks assessment remains largely based on visual inspection of the surface. Subsurface deterioration is often missed, and failures occur without warning. This PhD project aims to develop novel diagnostic techniques for earthwork asset condition appraisal and deterioration detection, helping to answer the question ‘how close to failure is the asset?’. By integrating a suite of state-of-the-art sensors and monitoring technologies with data fusion and AI analytics, this research will enable timely identification of deterioration processes and assessment of their evolution/extent.
Position 3: Probabilistic forecasting of climate change impacts on earthwork deterioration and failure
Project Details: Deterioration of earthworks slopes (cuttings and embankments), which support transport infrastructure and act as flood defences, is accelerating under increasing weather extremes resulting from global change, damaging critical infrastructure resilience – https://www.lboro.ac.uk/study/postgraduate/research-degrees/phd-opportunities/probabilistic-forecasting/.
This PhD aims to develop capabilities to forecast deterioration and failure in earthworks driven by weather cycles and climate change scenarios, to enable a transition from responsive maintenance interventions/renewals, to predictive, proactive, and targeted ones that help to avoid failures. By integrating numerical simulations, probabilistic techniques, and AI analytics, earthwork prognoses could be expressed in the form of ‘time-to-failure’ and/or ‘probability of survival’ under extreme weather events.