Birmingham receives £21.7 million to build National Buried Infrastructure Facility

A £21 million award has been made to the University of Birmingham, as part of a capital investment by BIS to the UK Collaboratorium for Research in Infrastructure and Cities (UKCRIC), to build a National Buried Infrastructure Facility (NBIF). The NBIF will enable scientists to test a variety of buried infrastructure systems at, or near to, full-scale to help them understand their physical and operational performance. This includes, for example, pipelines and cables, culverts and tunnels, road foundations and barrier wall systems. This knowledge will provide the scientific evidence base to inform decisions on innovative engineering of new infrastructure systems, cost-effective maintenance and adaptation of existing infrastructures, and building in resilience to cities' infrastructure systems in the face of increasing demands and the extreme events that are expected as the climate changes. The NBIF consists of a new state-of-the-art building housing a 25m x 10m x 5m deep test pit for testing buried infrastructure systems, pipeline and small-scale structural testing rigs, material characterisation facilities, material storage and test assembly areas, and a visualisation suite and knowledge transfer centre. The award also enables a major upgrade to the University's TRAIN Rig Facility, where scale-model testing of high speed train aerodynamics can be carried out. The University of Birmingham leads research into 'foresighting' for cities, using a range of methods based on future scenarios.