ICEC 2022 poster presentation abstracts 

Factors impacting environmental projection opinion pre and post COVID

A. Archaimbault, S. Gauthier

The project review the results of two large surveys of UK energy customers undertaken Pre- & Post- COVID to identify change in attitude towards the environment and factors affecting energy demand.

The impact of cooking on air quality – NO2 personal exposure

Y. En Lim

Over 50% of hobs in the UK operate with natural gas. This releases combustion generated NO2 and other pollutants into household air, which are related to asthma and other health outcomes. The project undertook a rapid evidence review showing limited amount of studies on NO2 personal exposure as a results of home cooking. To address this knowledge gap, the project undertook a series of experiments in a home environment to assess the impact of three parameters; (1) cooking heat level and duration, (2) distance to the source and (3) ventilation rate. The results of these experiments will be reviewed and discussed in the poster.

Understanding harassment in public spaces through a gendered lens on social media using BERT sentence encoders 

R.Hayward

Safety is one of the main barriers to active travel uptake in the UK and is frequently characterised or measured by reported road accidents and the likelihood of injury. However, perceived safety is more nuanced, often associated with the possibility of users experiencing criminal behaviour and harassment. Whilst it affects both genders, it disproportionately affects female members of society and consequently impacts the equity of travel using active travel modes.

This study focuses on online discourse on Twitter surrounding harassment. The suggested approach aims to maximise the available commentary by employing iterative unsupervised and semi supervised topic modelling using Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) sentence encoding. The methodology enables the selection of semantically similar Tweets that do not necessary use the same keywords as is the case for Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA).

In total the study collects 13124 Tweets posted between December 2018 and December 2021 these are filtered using the proposed methodology to 1015 relevant Tweets. For this initial iteration, collected Tweets are in English and limited to accounts that have been created in the UK. The Tweets are cleaned from noise that will inhibit NLP performance and classified into different topics using the Python library BERTopic with additional manual coding. M3Inference is a deep learning system for demographic inference, and it is used to infer user gender to explore the data through a gendered lens.

The findings of the study suggest that in general more women are part of the discourse surrounding harassment on Twitter and a greater percentage of women post about sexual harassment that occurs in public spaces. Significant topics also identified are campaigns, clothing choice and discussion surrounding the definition of sexual harassment. Other themes found within the data include the need for behaviour modification and the documentation of specific events.

Can stainless steel reinforcement bar facilitate more sustainable railway bridges?
A review of life cycle cost and carbon analysis 

H. Moodley

Bridges are fundamental fixed assets. Keeping bridges operational is of the utmost importance as costs caused by diversions or delays due to maintenance or replacement activities can be substantial. Reinforced concrete (RC) is a commonly used construction material for bridges as it offers versatile and economical designs. The corrosion of steel reinforcing bar (rebar) is however known as the main cause of premature deterioration of RC bridges. Stainless steel rebar, which is inherently corrosion resistant, offers a promising solution to the rebar corrosion problem in RC bridges. This paper presents a review of the current literature studies on Life Cycle Cost (LCC) and Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of RC bridges which considered stainless steel rebar as a corrosion prevention method. A summary of the key findings together with a discussion on the analysis of the parameters which impact the outcomes of the LCC and LCA studies is firstly presented and suggestions for future LCC and LCA studies are provided. The paper concludes with an outline for future work for investigating the suitability of stainless steel rebar in RC bridges.

Carbon reduction in NR geotechnical solutions 

T. Navaei

It is now unequivocal that anthropogenic carbon dioxide (CO2) is a major contributor to global warming. Significant levels of CO2 are also shown by the literature to be emitted by the construction industry and in the construction of railway earthworks. However, there is a gap in knowledge regarding granular detail of emissions in specific earthworks; particularly embankments, soil cuttings, and rock cuttings.
This research aims to produce detailed carbon footprints of these interventions with differing temporal life cycles: maintenance interventions with 2-year lifetimes, refurbishment interventions with 60-year lifetimes, and renewal interventions with 120-year lifetimes. The research will then, via analysis of the case studies’ footprints, identify the carbon hotspots and propose ways to mitigate and even offset these emissions. The preliminary findings of the research show that construction site activities account for many of the CO2 emissions in the construction of railway earthworks.

Stainless steel composite beams for sustainable bridge construction

R.Presswood 

Steel-concrete composite beams are commonly used in bridge construction. The corrosion of the supporting steel beams and the shear connectors are however known as a major cause of premature deterioration of composite bridges. Maintenance of bridges, and the associated delays and transport disruptions, are incredibly costly. Stainless steel beams and shear connectors offer a viable alternative solution to the steel corrosion problem in composite bridges located in harsh environmental conditions. This research aims to investigate the material behaviour and structural performance of stainless steel composite beams and to assess the life-cycle benefits of stainless steel over carbon steel composite construction. This will be done through tensile tests on stainless steel headed shear connectors, push-out tests on stainless steel composite specimens, numerical modelling and life-cycle assessment.

Global guidance for sustainable development in port-cities

T.Roberts, I.Williams, J.Preston, N.Clarke, M.Odum, S. O’Gorman

Port-cities are at the epicentre of many of the key issues and processes of modern times, such as globalisation, urbanisation and development. They provide considerable benefits, whilst producing negative impacts such as pollution and traffic congestion. Sustainable development in port-cities is therefore of great importance if these impacts are to be managed and a transition to a greener society is to take place. This global study was undertaken by the University of Southampton and engineering consultancy Ramboll and surveyed port authorities in 26 countries and city authorities in 13 countries. This highlighted 5 key approaches to encourage sustainable development in port-cities. These are: Port-city cooperation, the circular economy, renewable energy, reducing pollution, and adding additional social benefits for the local area. These approaches all enjoy high levels of support from both port and city authorities and can enable future port-city development to be sustainable and symbiotic.

Management of rail stress with climate change for modern and legacy track specifications 

A.Skarova, J.Harkness, M.Keillor, D.Milne, W.Powrie

Railways have a significant role to play in sustainable transportation. Rail travel is currently the only mode of rapid, large-scale, long-distance transport for both freight and passengers that offers zero carbon dioxide emissions at the point of use. However, our railway infrastructure needs to be more robust and resilient to the combined effects of climate change, traffic growth and increases in vehicle loads and speed. Rail buckling is of increasing concern as environmental temperatures rise and traffic loads, speed and intensity of use increase. A key indicator and control of the propensity for track buckling is the stress-free temperature of the rails. However, determining the actual stress-free temperature of a given section of track is challenging. Knowledge of the factors affecting stress-free temperature will help in the identification of vulnerable sections of track and the development of an appropriate maintenance regime. This study reviews and discusses the factors affecting stress-free temperature in ballasted railway track with continuous welded rails.

Investigation of a pure hydrogen pipeline for the Solent region

B. Vekeria, A.S. Bahaj

In the transition to net zero, hydrogen in combination with renewable electricity is expected to play a major role as a zero-emission energy carrier, and hydrogen pipelines can be used for large scale and low-cost distribution. The Solent Region has been identified as a strategic location for the development of a hydrogen infrastructure and this report proposes one of the first United Kingdom ‘at scale’ 100 per cent hydrogen pipelines, running from a proposed hydrogen production facility in Fawley to the Redbridge Causeway, to deliver green hydrogen to multiple end users within the region and to decarbonise them.

This report encompasses findings of a literature review on pipeline construction, technology and design. Through the review of legislation and planning policies, technical, environmental, and socioeconomic considerations relevant to the study area have been investigated. An options appraisal approach has been adopted for the routeing process and a preferred route alignment identified through the use of selection matrices, by comparing different route proposals against set criteria to avoid major constraints. The economic feasibility of the pipeline has been discussed and through the use of technical gas calculations, a method has been set out to estimate parameters such as pipeline diameter, operating pressures and pipeline capacity.