GEOLAB - Innovative solutions for critical infrastructure

For complete information about GEOLAB, please see the GEOLAB website.

The GEOLAB research infrastructure consists of 11 unique installations in Europe aimed to study subsurface behavior and the interaction with structural CI elements (e.g. a bridge) and the environment.
The European consortium consists of six top ranking universities from Cambridge, Delft, Maribor, Darmstadt, Zürich and Nantes, 3 renowned research organisations, i.e. CEDEX, Deltares, and NGI and the consultancy KPMG Future Analytics. The 10 GEOLAB partners are offering access to 11 experimental installations.

The GEOLAB consortium covers the full spectrum of subsurface behaviour (soil mechanics and hydrogeology), engineering (geotechnical, structural, engineering geology and environmental) and data science (ICT, data analyses and virtual access). Within these disciplines the consortium participants offer access to some of the most advanced installations for experimental research available worldwide.

Geotest Sites

The GEOTEST SITES research infrastructure managed by the NGI is a national research facility for geotechnical research, which forms the basis of NGI's contribution to GEOLAB.

The six benchmark test sites are located in Norway and on Svalbard and have been developed as field laboratories for the testing and verification of innovative soil investigation and testing methods, and prototypes of geotechnical structures. The sites cover the soil conditions of soft clay, quick clay, silt and sand.

As interest for the Arctic areas grows, one of the sites is in permafrost on Svalbard where detection, sampling, in situ testing and laboratory testing of frozen ground present significant challenges.

NGI offers in addition a unique full-scale snow avalanche test site (Fonnbu/Ryggfonn) for studying triggering factors, avalanche dynamics and its impact on the design of mitigation measures.
See more information about NGTS – Norwegian GeoTest Sites.