1 PhD student position on Infrastructure performance viewer in Sweden | Chalmers University of Technology

This position is part of a Chalmers strategy to strengthen the Area of Advance-The Built Environment. The position is within the research group Sustainable Building, established in summer 2012, at the division of Building Technology. The research group Sustainable Building works on concepts, tools and strategies to enhance the sustainability performance of construction materials, building products, buildings as well as entire cities.

Project description

The PhD will develop an "Ecological and economic life cycle performance tool for infrastructures" in cooperation with Europe's largest infrastructure project, the Norwegian highway route E39. The PhD will be supervised jointly by Chalmers and NTNU, Department of Civil and Transport Engineering, Prof. Rolf André Bohne in cooperation with Norwegian Public Road Administration.

The project aims to develop a tool that offers at the same time the opportunity to be used to assess the environmental and economic performance of new infrastructures as well as rehabilitation and maintenance activities related to already existing infrastructures, such as roads, bridges and tunnels. Environmental life cycle assessments (LCA) and economic life cycle assessments (LCCA) are well established methods and widely used, especially in building certification systems such as BREEAM, LEED, DGNB etc. Current best practices for road products and infrastructures take into consideration a set of technical requirements for their established uses, information on the content of hazardous, and in terms of environmental impact it is only remarked that all construction materials should not have an exceedingly high impact over their entire life cycle, on the environmental quality or on the climate during their construction, use and demolition.

Therefore, the proposed project have two aims; to develop a tool to visualize the LCA and LCCA performance of roads and, additionally, to conduct a feasibility study related to other types of infrastructures, such as bridges and tunnels over the entire life cycle in an early design stage as well as in the phase of usage.

You will get the chance to contribute to strengthen the prospering research field of Sustainable building at Chalmers, working in international projects and be supported by renowned experts in various related fields.

Qualifications:

To qualify as a PhD student, you must have a master's level degree corresponding to at least 240 higher education credits in civil or environmental engineering, mechanical engineering or similar disciplines, and be able to demonstrate your capability to conduct excellent research. Teaching experience is valued. Excellent writing and communication skills in English are required. If Swedish is not your native language, you are encouraged to learn it during your employment as a PhD student. Chalmers offers Swedish courses.