Elenor Naraidoo

Carving the Future: Intelligent and Sustainable Shape Optimisation

PI: Barbara Rossi

Steel and concrete used in construction account for almost 6% of global CO₂ emissions. Structural optimisation is imperative if the construction sector is to meet sustainable development goals within the next five years; however, structural engineers lack the tools to explore optimised forms that satisfy the industry’s manufacturing, fabrication, sustainability and safety requirements.

By working with industry partners, Elenor is discovering new structural forms using Bayesian optimisation to incorporate these constraints. She is also developing a probabilistic physics-informed neural network trained on thousands of simulations. This can supplement the Gaussian Process within the Bayesian optimisation loop, and act as a surrogate for finite element analysis when modelling structural behaviour.

The result? Faster, safer and more sustainable structural optimisation.