Rapid condition assessment of earthwork assets

Abstract

The UK has many old earth embankments, dams and cuttings, some more than 200 years old, that are still integral to our national infrastructure. These assets (earthworks) are crucial in transportation, water transport and storage, and flood prevention. Although they are often assumed to be stable, they gradually change over time through repeated use and seasonal or weather driven cyclic forcing. This cyclical forcing slowly degrades these assets through processes operating from the material scale to the slope scale, reducing their reliability and performance (Stirling et al., 2021). The changing climate is accelerating this deterioration. Anthropogenic climate change is causing more frequent and larger extreme weather events with heavier rainfall, longer droughts and rising temperatures. This will profoundly impact assets in two ways: 1) the likelihood of failure will increase as assets experience environmental extremes they were not designed for and have never experienced; 2) the deterioration rate will likely increase as they are exposed to more intense seasonal cycling (e.g. wetting and drying), reducing the current performance and operational life (Huang et al., 2023; Postill et al., 2021).

Maintaining the thousands of kilometres of assets in the UK poses a challenge for asset owners (e.g., Environment Agency, Network Rail and National Highways), who, with their finite resources and carbon net zero targets, must prioritise sites for inspection, monitoring and remediation. Information on current asset conditions is needed to prioritise assets for monitoring and remediation. Identifying, developing and employing state-of-the-art and novel approaches to asset condition assessment has been a key consideration of the EPSRC funded ACHILLES project (Blake et al., 2022). Here, a Rapid Asset Condition Assessment (RACA) framework is introduced to aid the assessment of assets and to guide the collection of new information to refine condition estimates. The RACA framework will enable improved prioritisation of maintenance and remediation for individual assets and is designed to benefit earthwork owners, consultants and contractors responsible for managing and maintaining geotechnical assets.

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