Nkechi assesses structures that were built with confidence, extended with optimism, and are now asked to carry loads their designers never contemplated. Her speciality is the remaining-life question, and the intervention decision that follows from it.
Her group's work is unusually consequential for research: an assessment that supports deferring a renewal saves an asset owner a great deal of money, and an assessment that brings one forward may prevent an incident. She is correspondingly careful about uncertainty, and impatient with monitoring installed without a decision attached to it.
That impatience is her recurring theme. A great deal of instrumentation now sits on British infrastructure producing data that nobody has agreed to act upon. Before her group installs a sensor, it establishes what reading would change what decision, and who has the authority to make it. If there is no answer, the sensor does not go on.
She also works on climate adaptation, principally scour and drainage, where the honest position is that several design return periods have already been exceeded more often than they should have been, and the standards have not caught up.
Selected projects
Named work, with a sentence of context each.
Masonry arch remaining-life assessment
Assessed a group of nineteenth-century arches using inspection records, targeted coring and load testing, supporting a deferred renewal on two and an immediate intervention on a third.
Decision-linked monitoring specification
Developed a monitoring specification in which every instrument is mapped to a threshold, an action and an accountable owner. Adopted by an asset owner as standard practice.
Scour vulnerability screening
Screened a portfolio of river crossings against updated hydrological data, and reordered the intervention programme on the basis of the results.
Working with Adeyemi
She asks for the inspection history first. Fifty years of routine examination reports, however dull, contain more information about a structure than any new survey she could commission.
Her assessments state their confidence plainly, including the cases in which the honest answer is that the evidence does not yet support deferral. Asset owners have generally found this more useful than a comfortable number.
Looking for
Asset owners with a structure, a service history, and a decision that has to be made this funding period.
Probably not for
Monitoring pilots with no named decision-maker. She will ask who acts on the data, and the question tends to end the conversation.
Credits and contributions
- Technical adviser to a major infrastructure asset owner on structural assessment
- Member of a standards committee on the assessment of existing structures
- Supervisor of fourteen completed doctorates in structural assessment and monitoring