Doctoral Defense by Nicola Gottardi

On Friday, 24. October 2025 at 2:30 PM, Nicola Gottardi presented his doctoral theses with the title "Real-time Structural Health Assessment of Segmental Tunnel Linings".


Dear Nicola, congratulations on reaching this milestone! We all wish you success in all your future projects!


Abstract:
The underground network has been constantly expanding, and one of the challenges is ensuring safety, operability, and durability of tunnels throughout their service life. In this context, structural health monitoring (SHM) plays a crucial role for the evaluation of the tunnel lining performance and safety. Tunnel lining health assessment faces unique challenges due to limited accessibility to critical areas and a sparse availability of measurement data compared to the complexity of the structural system. The objective of this thesis was to develop a framework to accomplish comprehensive SHM of segmental tunnel linings, by leveraging the benefits of computational and surrogate models to accommodate a limited monitoring of the structure. Numerical simulations are employed to generate synthetic data, which are used to train surrogate models capable of reconstructing the lining structural state, accounting for possible damage, and its loading conditions based on limited measurements. The SHM framework proposed in this thesis, validated on experiments and a tunnel project, represents a flexible approach adaptable to various monitoring configurations, enabling real-time evaluations of the structural health of segmental linings to ensure tunnel operability and safety in a cost-effective manner.

Promotionsaushang_NicolaGottardi.pdf