David Parkin Visiting Professor lecture 'What lies beneath' by Professor Climent Molins
Professor Molins is an Associate Professor at the Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya Barcelona
Tech, and Structural Engineer for more than two hundred structural designs of bridges and
buildings. He has participated in several projects funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and
Education and is a reviewer for a number of journals, including Structural Engineering (Elsevier)
and Materials and Structures (Springer).
David Parkin Visiting Professorships are awarded on an annual basis to help to support an
outstanding academic with a permanent position at a non-UK university to spend a period of time up
to 12 months, as a Visiting Professor at the University of Bath.
Professor Molins, in his lecture, discussed the use of segmental linings, currently the most
used tunnelling technique which has reduced, to a large extent, negative effects on upper existing
buildings. However, these effects still exist and must be assessed prior to construction.
The determination of the damages produced in a building by a certain differential settlement
hardly depends on its structural configuration and, therefore, the settlement range has to be
adopted in a local manner depending on the characteristics of the buildings of the drilled zone.
Using advanced numerical models can significantly help in the definition of the settlement’s
thresholds for each building typology. However some uncertainties remain on the structural
behaviour of segmental tunnel linings. To overcome them, an in-situ real scale test on a segmental
tunnel lining was developed and applied on an experimental section in the new line 9 (L9) of the
Barcelona underground (Metro).
You can listen to this lecture by using the
University
Panopto Recording.
