Nottingham Trent University researcher and AECOM win prestigious ICE award

Rolands research for which the award was won, aimed at demonstrating the successful application of low-cost vision-based systems, such as smartphones, for the assessment of structural performance of both laboratory and real-world structures. Traditionally, such assessments required working at height, with highly trained personnel installing expensive sensor systems - specialised high-resolution cameras and software licences cost in excess of £20,000 a year.

Rolands, Senior Lecturer in Civil Engineering at NTU, conducted extensive research into finding a more cost-effective and accessible solutions to monitoring deformations and movements of structures. The concept has significant potential for planning, sustainability and health and safety impacts, using a piece of technology that engineers keep in their pockets: smartphones. This led to the development of the app DeforMonit, which can be used to analyse both images and videos to track locations surface feature, and measure structural deformations.

As well as being a key tool in the conducting of research, the app is also supporting teaching on the MSc Structural Engineering with Materials course at NTU, as well as variety of student projects.

NTU's Dr Roland Kromanis

"Research has to be brought into practice in order for both academia and industry to succeed. It is a courageous step for both: industry to apply research into practice and academia to make their research applicable to real world challenges" says Rolands.

This research was a joint project, undertaken alongside strategic partner AECOM. Since becoming a partner in 2017, AECOM and NTU have worked together to ensure the benefits extend across the University, by working together on collaborative research, tailoring of new training, enriched course content and opportunities for students to gain industry experience.

Daniel Smith, Technical Director at AECOM, says "It's fantastic to see Dr Rolands Kromanis receive the ICE award for his work into application of low-cost cameras for measurement collection. This was part of a wider collaboration between NTU and AECOM exploring the use of 3D printing techniques and graphene enhanced materials for applications as infrastructure assets. This study successfully allowed the measurement and data collection to confirm the designed parameters and for the project to progress to the large scale protype phase."

You can read more about our work with AECOM, and our other strategic partners across a variety of industries and sectors on our website.