The aim of the research is to increase cost effectiveness in constructing roads, streets and airfields. Research also provides data for measures to improve traffic safety and the environment. VTI is now reinforcing its competence in this area of research, in regard to both its breadth and depth, by appointing Sigurdur Erlingsson to a newly established professorial chair. Sigurdur Erlingsson has a well known profile and his expertise in the field of road engineering is frequently used both in Sweden and internationally.

“With Sigurdur Erlingsson we will be more attractive in the market, both nationally and internationally. We are now making an investment with the aim to improve our position in the market in the long term, and hope that one of its benefits will be that we will receive an even larger proportion of the European research funds,” says Marianne Grauers, Director of Infrastructure at VTI.

Sigurdur Erlingsson has a degree in geophysics from the University of Iceland and also a civil engineering degree from the Royal Institute of Technology KTH, Stockholm. At the beginning of the nineties he was awarded a doctorate in soil mechanics by KTH. In recent years he has held a chair in civil and environmental engineering at the University of Iceland. He will now hold this chair on a part time basis, parallel with the chair at VTI.

“In the past five years my field of research has increasingly concentrated on road engineering, coupled with bearing capacity and the mechanistic design of roads. Earlier, my research was concerned more with work in the field of soil and rock mechanics, preferably in relation to earthquakes,” says Sigurdur Erlingsson.
“In the road sector, there is nowadays a move from empirical design methods to something that might be called mechanistic road design methods.  But, before such a step can be taken, it is necessary to understand and mechanistically describe all the factors that influence the service life, i.e. the degradation, of a road structures. This is a complex and challenging task. In practice, it is a matter of making tests in a laboratory or field environment in which real loads are simulated to obtain the real behaviour. Numerical simulations are also made. All with the aim of calculating how road pavements as a whole behave over a long time. I have been involved in a number of such studies and have done work both in the field and the laboratory. In these studies I have used data from the VTI Heavy Vehicle Simulator.”

The heavy vehicle simulator is a mobile platform for test loading and accelerated testing of road pavements at full scale. With the simulator, it is possible to simulate the real loads exerted by heavy vehicles and thus study how different types of road pavements cope with heavy traffic.