The project coordinator was recently featured on the “90 Segundos de Ciência” (90 seconds of science) radio programme. The short interview, available here, aired on the Portuguese national radio station Antena 1. A translated transcription can be read below.

Pedro Montenegro: Hi, my name is Pedro Montenegro. I’m a researcher at the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto, in the CONSTRUCT R&D Unit. InBridge4EU is a European project. The main objective is to develop norms for the design of new [railway] bridges, but also to study existing railway bridges. The European Union and the European Union Agency for Railways are focused on defining European interoperability. What does interoperability consist in? It consists in being sure that any train that runs (or is manufactured) in a country can also run in all the other European Union countries, making for a cohesive and well-functioning European rail network. Bridges, mainly high-speed ones (which aren’t the only bridges addressed in this project, but they’ll be the most studied), present an issue. It’s not just the matter of their structural safety (i.e. the danger of the bridge collapasing), but the bridge vibration can cause instability to the train itself. It can cause derailment, compromise passenger comfort… And so, large bridge vibrations usually cause the instabilization of a train. The objective of this project is to improve those norms that we currently have in the area of bridge dynamics, so that we perhaps can make equally safe yet less expensive bridges. Having more advanced models, we can fine-tune the safety criteria and in this way have equally safe bridges (in which the train runs safely), but at the sime time getting the bridge as inexpensive as possible.

Images from FEUP and Antena 1.