Resilient

The nation’s critical military and civilian infrastructure relies heavily on concrete structures that are aging and degrading at unpredictable rates. Current concrete testing methods force a choice between rapid, low-fidelity laboratory proxies and slow, high-fidelity field observations. Neither approach can adequately predict real-world outcomes because they fail to capture the synergistic, coupled complexity of dynamic loads, chemical ingress, and thermal cycling.

The Resilient Disruption Opportunity seeks to establish a new paradigm for forecasting the long-term durability of concrete infrastructure through the closed-loop co-development of advanced modeling and physical testing. Resilient’s main technical challenge is to create a scalability model to characterize fundamental degradation mechanics and predict how micro-scale damage translates into macro-scale structural failure over time.

Resilient will use a material accelerator to rapidly generate the high-fidelity data needed to validate and refine the Scalability Model across diverse climates. This closed-loop approach will enable accurate, risk-based service-life predictions, eliminating the need for costly structural over-design and accelerating the deployment of resilient, long-lasting infrastructure.