Diego Lorenzo Allaix
At TNO I am the technical lead in research and consultancy projects about safety assessment of existing structures, with main focus on bridges and wind turbines, safety philosophy for the sustainability-oriented design of concrete structures, with main focus on reuse of existing load-bearing elements, safety philosophy for assessing the impact of climate change on structures, monitoring-informed assessment of traffic loads at object and network level and NLFEM-based safety assessment of reinforced concrete structures.
At Ghent University I am the lecturer in charge of the course “FEM and Constitutive Material Laws in Structural Engineering”.
Professorship chair
Computational structural analysis (Ghent University).
Research area
My expertise and research focus on developing models and approaches for the design and assessment of structures with the aim of achieving safe, sustainable and future-proof civil infrastructure.
Infrastructure owners nowadays face new challenges due to increasing loads and users' needs, deterioration, climate change effects, and new demands for a sustainable built environment. To ensure critical infrastructures remain safe, available, and meet service level requirements at acceptable costs and while reducing their carbon footprint, a thorough understanding and predictive modelling of the performance of structures and infrastructure networks is necessary.
My work involves developing physics-based and data-enhanced models as well as probabilistic methods to support performance assessment at structure and network levels beyond the current state-of-the-art. I apply these models in consultancy projects and share the developed knowledge with the engineering community by actively participating in international research organisations and standardisation committees at national and European levels, Additionally, I use these models to educate new generations of civil engineers at Ghent University.
Top publications
- Allaix, D.L., Bigaj-van Vliet, A., Mancini, G., Darò, P., Strauss, A., Bergmeister, K., Köhler, J, (2023), Future perspectives of standardization for a safe European transport infrastructure, ce/papers : Proceedings in Civil Engineering. 6 (5) PP. 515-527; ISSN 2509-7075, Ernst & Sohn GmbH https://doi.org/10.1002/cepa.2025.
- Engen, M., Hendriks, M.A.N., Monti, G., Allaix, D.L. (2021). Treatment of modelling uncertainty of NLFEA in fib Model Code 2020. Structural Concrete, 22(6): 3202-3212.
- Roubos, A., Allaix, D., Fischer, K., Steenbergen, R., Jonkman, S. (2020). Target reliability indices for existing quay walls derived on the basis of economic optimisation and human safety requirements. Structure and Infrastructure Engineering 16(4), 613-625.
Delft - Molengraaffsingel (NEXT)
Molengraaffsingel 8
NL-2629 JD Delft