Advancing InSAR for Predictive Railway Earthworks Monitoring and Risk Management - PhD

Loughborough University

Deterioration of earthworks slopes (cuttings and embankments), which support transport infrastructure and act as flood defences, is accelerating under increasing weather extremes resulting from global change, damaging critical infrastructure resilience.

This project is part of the prestigious Loughborough University Vice Chancellor’s PhD Cluster – RAINDROP (Resilient eArthwork INfrastructure: Diagnosis, RehabilitatiOn & Prognosis). The Doctoral Researcher (DR) will join a cohort of DRs who will be working on a series of interlinked, interdisciplinary projects for sustainable, intelligent, and climate change-resilient infrastructure slopes.

This PhD is co-funded and co-supervised by Network Rail. The aim of this project is to enhance the utility of InSAR (Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar) in railway earthworks asset management. It will deliver improved InSAR techniques, including an advanced SBAS methodology and AI-driven spatial resolution upgrades, for more accurate monitoring of railway earthworks. Additionally, the project will integrate environmental data through data fusion and develop automated machine learning tools for anomaly detection and risk assessment. The effectiveness of the developed approach will be validated and refined through comparisons with alternative observations and measurements.