COMSA’s technical and innovation area has been awarded a total of six new R&D projects, with funding coming from national and European sources, aimed at improving different stages in the process of construction and maintenance of railway infrastructure, roads, tunnels and buildings.
In the field of railways, COMSA is part of the European consortium of S-CODE, a project that proposes a new design to reduce the complex composition of the switches and crossings – structures that allow the trains to change track – in order to increase their reliability and reduce maintenance costs.
The aim of the SINATU project is to create a system that analyses the structural status of the concrete in tunnels and that determines more precisely the type of maintenance to be applied. For this purpose, a non-invasive sensor network will be designed that is capable of recording the vibrational behaviour and transmitting this information to the control centre for analysis.
RECAR, meanwhile, seeks to reduce the costs of maintenance of the road surfaces following fuel spillage. In order to achieve this, the research is focused on creating new asphalt mixtures with greater resistance to these spills.
The ROADZ initiative promotes a system for the illumination of road signs from the energy generated by the passage of vehicles over a section of asphalt equipped with piezoelectric material. This is an innovative project because these signs are currently powered by either solar energy or wind energy or are connected to the grid.
The BIM (Building Information Modelling) model has become increasingly important in building since it optimises management and reduces the costs of design and construction with the use of 3D simulation models. Along these same lines, the SCAVE project aims to create an interactive facility which, through virtual and augmented reality technologies connected with BIM, facilitates the monitoring – including remote monitoring – of the project.
In the field of risk prevention in the industrial sector, the CARE project will develop new personal protective equipment (PPE) based on the detection of the electric field of catenaries, transformers or other electrical installations. This PPE will provide the operator with a higher level of protection and, in the event of an accident, will provide information on the person’s state of health, facilitating the response of the emergency services.
This research has joint funding of almost 9 million euros provided by the European Commission from the Shift2Rail programme, the 2016 Challenges-Collaboration call for proposals from the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, and also from the Strategic Action Programme for Economy and Digital Society of the Ministry of Energy, Tourism and the Digital Agenda.
Construction of dual-carriageway tunnels on the road from Bogotça to Villavicencio in Colombia