Mott MacDonald

This award recognises a hi-tech advancement or concept that has helped a company improve its performance or delivery of a specific challenging element of a project, between January 2022 and January 2023. This category is not aimed at projects that have achieved overall excellence – such projects should be entered into one of the six project categories. The entrant may have achieved technical excellence through producing a new approach to analysis or design, advanced techniques or procedures during design or delivery and/or working with its customers to improve delivery of a specific part of a project through technical refinement. An entry should be for a single technical advance or development applied to a specific part of a project. Developments applied to a number of projects may be better placed in the Digital Innovation or Equipment Innovation categories. The geotechnical work on the project presented must be completed at the time of the submission.

Integrating geo-seismic demands from advanced SSI analyses into structural design of cut-and-cover box in liquefiable soils

This submission highlights the technical development that was completed while working on the design of cut and cover boxes in liquefiable soil in seismic countries. Design solutions were obtained by performing state of the art numerical modelling using advanced constitutive soil models and integrating the geotechnical outputs to the structural software’s to aid in total holistic design and detailing of rebars. The automation developed during the project execution enabled almost 200 model analysis results to be post processed and used in identifying the worst load combinations and design scenarios. Moreover, the innovative approach improved understanding of the soil structure interaction and visually presented the information which helped in communicating risks to various stakeholders. This approach is faster and more accessible and will mitigate earthquake induced problems in many parts of the world where access to technology remains poor, specially in developing countries.