Structures and Safety

The Section for Structures and Safety is aimed on the art of analyzing and designing safe and durable structures balancing the use of resources, materials and the demand for robustness, within both Structural Engineering in the built environment, as well as Structural Mechanics within transportation and energy generating/storing structures, where the own weight of the structure is typically of paramount importance.

The section contains three research fields and associated research groups:

• Structural Engineering for buildings and infrastructures
• Lightweight Structures for transport and energy generating/storing structures
• Fire Safety Engineering for civil and mechanical engineering applications

The general focus for all three research groups is understanding, modelling, testing and controlling the mechanical behavior of the load-carrying systems in structures, exposed to the mechanical and environmental loads, which they have to withstand throughout their structural lifetime or during accidental mechanical or thermal overloading. The research carried out in the three research groups is furthermore executed over a range of -structural applications and includes the following disciplines within structural applications in both civil and mechanical engineering:

• Structural mechanics of metal, concrete, timber and polymer composite structures
• Structural dynamics
• Fatigue and structural life-time
• Damage mechanics and damage assessment of structures and infrastructures
• Wind and earthquake engineering
• Fire safety technology
• Numerical modelling methods
• Advanced experimental structural mechanics methodologies

The available experimental infrastructure for the section for high-level and state-of-the-art structural, materials and fire testing (CASMaT/Structural Lab and Fire Lab), as well as high-performance computation clusters, allow for research of high excellence on the relation between the impact of load scenarios during the lifetime and robustness of the structural systems. The section also utilizes the DTU supercomputer clusters and dedicated equipment for full-scale and in-field static and dynamic structural testing and monitoring.