Ageing infrastructure, reactive inspection

Concrete is the most widely used solid material on Earth: global production surpasses 30 billion tonnes a year and accounts for roughly 8% of global CO₂ emissions. Reinforced concrete carries the load in most safety-critical infrastructure — bridges, tunnels, nuclear facilities and wind-turbine foundations. Europe alone has 300,000 concrete bridges, valued at €300 billion and costing €8 billion a year to maintain; in the UK, over 3,200 bridges were reported substandard in 2022.

Inspection today is still largely manual and subjective. Automated tools such as drones, ground-penetrating radar and LiDAR collect substantial data, but current practice remains reactive and fragmented — with consequences demonstrated tragically by the 2018 Morandi bridge collapse in Italy. REVIVE develops the non-destructive evaluation and structural health monitoring methods needed to make inspection predictive instead of reactive.