Iñaki Piñero, a TECNALIA researcher, has been selected as a national expert in road bridge inspection

Last November our colleague Iñaki Piñero, an infrastructure researcher from Building Technologies, was invited as a national expert in the field of road bridge inspection to a Training School in Thessaloniki (Greece). The COST ACTION TU1406 was in charge of organising this meeting at the hands of the Civil Engineering Department of Aristotle University, and the Egnatia Odos AE engineering company.

 COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology) is one of the largest European intergovernmental networks for the coordination of European scientific and technical research. Its objective is to strengthen scientific and technical research in Europe, financing the establishment of collaborative networks among researchers.
Experts from different European countries (Austria, France, Norway, Latvia, Turkey, Macedonia, Cyprus, Belgium, Hungary, Israel, Holland, Greece and Spain), who carry out structural inspections on bridges, exchanged the different courses of action, as well as the more recent knowledge about the evaluation procedures and the methodology that is being carried out in the COST ACTION TU1406.
During the work performed in the field on different bridges, it was possible to verify that there is a great disparity in Europe with respect to the way in which the indicators are quantified and the objectives are specified.

TECNALIA actively participates in this action, the objective of which is to bring together the research community, companies that are dedicated to conservation and maintenance and owners of this type of infrastructure to accelerate the establishment of a European guideline.