INSPECTION OF GEOTECHNICAL ROAD AND RAIL INFRASTRUCTURE UNDER CONSIDERATION OF CLIMATE CHANGE RELATED EFFECTS

Most parts of the highway and railway network in Austria were designed or renewed during the period of 1950 to 1980. During this time, geotechnical engineering went through a phase in which the design of retaining walls and embankments was improved. Examples of significant steps were pre-stressed anchors, vibro-stone columns, geotextile-reinforced earth embankments and artificial soil stabilization. These allowed to expand the infrastructure network into areas with increasingly complex or unfavourable geotechnical and environmental conditions. These structures were planned according to standards and regulations based on the fundamental approach that the environmental conditions are constant over their entire service life. Recent models and simulations on the topic of climate change have shown, that there was a significant increase in climate dynamics during the past thirty years. Future challenges towards infrastructure rise from increasing variability of seasonal effects, localized high-intensity rainfall or drought events and changes of vegetation on adjacent slopes. While today’s models are still vague on the prediction of the total climate effects in the future, even the increased dynamic during the last 30 to 40 years puts some of the existing infrastructure under additional stress, added to their general ageing and deterioration.
According to Austrian regulations and standards, the safety assessment is done by visual inspections in predefined intervals and additionally after “extreme events”. While the definitions for these events aren’t clearly defined yet, there is a need to think beyond the current framework and adapt it to challenges from climate change and climate change related effects. As part of this adaptation, the damage processes from changing climate conditions and the adaption of inspection strategies to identify these processes at an early stage are being investigated in an ongoing research project. Therefore, current practices are expanded with modern mapping and modelling tools for an integrated assessment of structural and geotechnical effects, including environmental hazards and the evolution of damaging processes.
This article summarises first results and findings of the research project MORICE – Maintenance and Operation of Road and rail Infrastructure subjected to Climate change Effects. In addition to identifying key areas of consideration that are mainly influenced by climate change-related effects, the focus is also on analysing testing and inspection methods. The latter are to be used primarily for their application to record changes in order to determine their use for recording climate change-related effects and the impact of climate change on geotechnical structures in order to incorporate the resulting methods into future inspection strategies.