Dr Jitendra Agarwal

His current research on structural safety and nonlinear dynamics has origins in his PhD work and it has been gaining depth and breadth through the continuation of this work, some of which is in collaboration with other members of the systems group and dynamics group.

The concept of vulnerability is applicable to all systems whether technical or social; however, recent work has shown that its usage differs. In the short term, he plans to examine the vulnerability of structures to dynamic progressive collapse using the concepts of energy. Considerations of non-linearity will provide new depth to vulnerability assessment of structures. Research is in progress to investigate the issues of modelling of non-linear systems and to identify the global behaviour of such systems. For exploring the nonlinear dynamics, he is keen to develop modelling and simulation tools on the high performance computing facilities.

Much of this research is directly relevant to the broader faculty themes of dynamics, intelligent structures and global change and it is being done in collaboration with other colleagues. He has established links with other researchers in structural safety, particularly through COST action on robustness of structures and membership of international scientific committees and editorial boards.

His long term vision is to create a generic framework for the vulnerability and risk assessment of infrastructures. This work is being done in a multi-disciplinary team. Infrastructures are complex systems and hierarchical modelling approaches will be used. This also requires dealing with uncertainty. Appropriate models will be developed in collaboration with other researchers in the faculty and elsewhere.