Name: Mohammad Afaghi

Title of the project: Fatigue Performance of Concrete

Background and description of the project:

Fatigue of concrete has been given intensive attention during the last few decades, especially between the 1980s and 1990s, when the design of new types of structures such as marine structures exposed to wind and wave loading were governed by fatigue.

During the last few years, there has been a high investment in the construction of offshore wind turbines to transit to clean and renewable energies; hence, the fatigue design of concrete requires to be reconsidered due to several reasons:

• Using new/higher strength materials.
• Adoption of ultimate strength design (LSD).
• Improving the lifespan of marine structures.
• Unreliability of traditional design method (Palmgren-Miner).
• Considering the marine conditions;
  • Different random cycling loading generated by wind and wave.
  • The presence of sea water.

In this project, the main focus would be on two sides;

1. Material: Investigation of crack behavior under dynamic wave load.
2. Design: Performing a novel study in fatigue life prediction of concrete using machine learning technique with two possible approaches: (1) Fatigue life prediction based on crack propagation, and (2) fatigue life prediction based on existed data.

Date of start of PhD: 02/Aug/2021