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The European Research Council (ERC) has awarded a Proof of Concept (PoC) grant to Jose Adam, a researcher from the ICITECH Institute of the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV), for the development of the Encast project: "Implementing a new line of defence to avoid the catastrophic collapse of precast buildings".

With these grants, each worth €150,000, the European Research Council seeks to maximise the commercial and societal impact of results obtained in ERC projects of scientific excellence.

In the case of Professor Adam, in 2020, he received an ERC Consolidator Grant to carry out his Endure project, in which he devised a radical proposal to protect buildings from catastrophic collapse in extreme situations. The design approach ensures sufficient connectivity between structural members for operational conditions but segments the building into different parts and isolates collapse when failure propagation would otherwise be inevitable.

Radical science in the precast concrete sector

Jose Adam started working on this idea in 2017, with a Leonardo Grant awarded by the BBVA Foundation. Last year, he successfully validated his proposal in a full-scale test with a purposely built precast building. And just a month and a half ago, his work - carried out together with his colleagues at the ICITECH Institute - made the cover of Nature, the highest impact multidisciplinary sciences journal in the world. With this new ERC-PoC grant, they want to go one step further: Encast will contribute to the implementation of the radical science carried out in Endure in the precast concrete sector.

"Although this single test demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed approach, it only focused on one specific type of precast system. In a heavily regulated construction industry, many engineers and architects will be cautious and somewhat sceptical before applying fuse-based segmentation to systems that differ significantly from the one tested in Endure. Therefore, it is crucial to adequately demonstrate the validity of the proposed approach for other types of precast systems," explains Jose Adam.

In addition, other goals of Encast are to formulate a simplified design procedure and integrate it into user-friendly software, as well as to perform experimental demonstrations. The ICITECH-UPV team will also develop a strategy for the exploitation of fuse-based segmentation solutions in the precast market.

"Thanks to this grant from the European Research Council, we will make a leap from fundamental and radical science to innovation. The success of Encast will enable the increased use of robust prefabricated systems, helping to build safer, more affordable and sustainable buildings," says Jose Adam.

About the ERCs Proof of Concept

The Proof of Concept funding calls are only open to researchers who have already received an ERC grant for frontier research. These grants aim to facilitate the exploration of the commercial and societal potential of the results of ERC-funded projects. In doing so, they aim to enable ERC-funded ideas to move from frontier research to innovation.

In this year's first call, the European Commission received 328 proposals, and only 100 were funded (approximately 30% success rate).