1 year of PhD Student! Work Activities

On the 21^st of August 2015, a Spanish guy first stepped into Ireland with no idea about how the work routine was going to be. After a few days settling in and sorting accommodation issues, the 1^st of September that guy started to work. This means that it is the anniversary, and this post is going to give an overall view of what I have done until now. Other posts will be dedicated to cover individual topics in detail.

Four conference papers have been done so far: Tirana (Albania), Belfast (UK), Galway (Ireland) and Cape Town (South Africa). The topics show a development of the research plan:

·         SEMC2016 Conference in Cape Town introduced the ranges of data analysed when using different measurement methods,

·         BCCCE2016 Conference in Tirana showed the curvature method as a bridge damage detector,

·         CERI2016 Conference in Galway studied the influence of the road profile and the noise in the results and

·        CSHM6 Belfast Conference introduced case studies in order to verify the method.

Fig 1. Conference logos.

Learning activities that I have completed during this period include Endnote training, Academic Written English course, seminars and demonstrating to students. I have also helped in a community activity in Willow School with the marshmallow challenge in which we had lots of fun.

Fig 2. In the middle of an Endnote lesson for referencing with Shah Nur.

Finally, I made two visits to our Industrial partner in the project, i.e., Greenwood Engineering. There, I was able to see how this Danish company works and also collect some data information on how the Traffic Speed Deflectometer (TSD) operates. The TSD is intended to measure the road stiffness in order to detect damage. However, if we manage to make the TSD able to measure bridge damage, it will be a significant contribution for monitoring bridges in a cost-efficient manner.

Fig 3. Photo with the Italian TSD.

More posts about these topics will come soon!