Supervisors:

A) Dr Weena Lokuge  B) A/Prof. Karu Karunasena Contact: weena.lokuge@usq.edu.auUniversity of Southern Queensland

Road infrastructure becomes extremely important in enhancing the resilience of a community during and after a disaster event. USQ and RMIT recently conducted a study on the bridges damaged by the 2013 flood in Lockyer Valley region to find out that whilst it is extremely important to design road infrastructure on urban and rural arterial roads to be resilient under extreme events, these routes often have a redundancy in the design with a number of possible alternative routes. Rural roads often are the only access roads to the community. Damage to the floodways and bridges due to high flood loading in these roads was attributed to the overall vulnerability of the road infrastructure.

This project will a) evaluate elastomeric polymers as a strengthening material and polymer concrete and geopolymer concrete as a new construction material for bridges and floodways (by studying the structural performance of the new materials) and b) conduct whole of life cycle cost analysis for the retrofitting options and for the new construction by comparing with normal reinforced concrete infrastructure.