Proceedings of the Department of Civil and Structural Engineering, University of Sheffield – The Annual Postgraduate Research Student Conference 2015

The ten papers which appear in this proceedings were contributed by current research students studying in the Department of Civil & Structural Engineering at the University of Sheffield. The papers which have been included provide a flavour of the breadth of the research currently being undertaken in the Department. The Department has a long history of undertaking research in the field of structural engineering and mechanics, and the area is represented in the proceedings by five papers. Two of the contributions focus on cold-formed steel sections, popular in the U.S. for many years and now attracting increasing interest in Europe, whilst a further two contributions consider the seismic response of structures. The final contribution in the area appraises the efficacy of a sophisticated constitutive model used to predict fatigue damage when complex loading regimes are involved. The Department is also strong in the fields of water engineering and fluid mechanics, with recent staff appointments further enhancing our capability in these areas. The proceedings include a paper on green roofs (which can contribute to biodiversity and stormwater management) and a paper on the flow patterns and mixing processes in vegetated ponds. For many years the Department has had significant expertise in the field of geotechnical engineering. One paper in this field considers the potential for the piled foundations used to support buildings to be used as heat exchangers, to reduce energy use, whilst a further paper focuses on numerical modelling of the experimental apparatus used to establish the dynamic characteristics of sand. The Department is now also active in the area of building simulation, and a paper in the proceedings considers the use of a data driven, neural network based, approach to predicting temperature in naturally ventilated buildings. Producing the present volume of papers marks a positive new development for the Department. We are confident that the research students involved will have benefited from the experience of writing up their work in the form of a conference paper, and sincerely hope that this volume will be the first of many. Lastly, we would like to express our heartfelt gratitude to the European Structural Integrity Society (http://www.structuralintegrity.eu) and to the Italian Group of Fracture (www.gruppofrattura.it) for supporting the publication of these proceedings.