World's first soil and structure interaction test facility opens

Mar 26, 2024

The new Soil-Foundation-Structure Interaction (SoFSI) facility - to look at how buildings and infrastructure interact with the ground when subjected to dynamic loads - has opened its doors.

The SoFSI enables researchers to investigate how foundations, dynamic loading and soil interact.

By doing so the facility aims to help researchers identify more efficient building methods and improve the safety of future infrastructure.

It also aims to reduce the economic and carbon costs of high value infrastructure projects like High Speed 2, bridges and offshore wind farms.

The University of Bristol received £12M from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) for the construction of the SoFSI facility at its Langford Campus.

SoFSI will enable large, close to prototype scale experiments for use by both academics and industry.

Its laboratory houses a 4m deep soil pit for testing foundations, a 50t capacity biaxial shaking table for dynamic testing of structures and a smaller, high-performance six-axis shaking table.

The laboratory has been designed for research into five core areas: nuclear power plant soil-structure interaction, high speed rail, offshore wind turbines, monopiles and pile groups, and integral bridges.

University of Bristol professor of earthquake engineering Anastasios Sexos said: “The aim of this testing facility is to inform design that is not only safer but also cost-efficient. Investigating how buildings and infrastructure interact with the ground under natural and man-made hazards allows us to improve the smartness and resiliency of our infrastructure while at a lower financial cost and a reduced environmental footprint."

University of Bristol senior lecturer in structural and earthquake engineering Flavia De Luca said: “SoFSI has been designed to help us understand, among other issues, how the span of lower cost, minimal maintenance integral bridges can be extended so that new high speed railway lines would be faster to construct, cheaper to maintain, more resilient to climate change, and enable us to minimise resource requirement.”

The SoFSI forms part of the first phase of the UK Collaboratorium for Research on Infrastructure and Cities (UKCRIC) network of 13 universities delivering 10 national laboratories seeking to underpin the renewal, sustainment and improvement of infrastructure and cities in the UK and elsewhere.

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