PhD Studentship: Civil Engineering: SURES Funded PhD in Advanced AI-Designed Bio-Based Capsules for Self-Healing Asphalt

Climate change and advances in artificial intelligence (AI) are reshaping road design, as accelerated asphalt ageing driven by environmental and traffic changes leads to earlier cracking and increased pothole formation. Traditional repair methods are often labour-intensive and resource-consuming, highlighting the need for advanced self-healing solutions to design more sustainable and durable asphalt roads. Bio-based capsules containing rejuvenating agents offer a promising strategy to extend pavement lifespan by autonomously repairing micro-cracks and mitigating early-stage pothole formation. By integrating AI-enhanced computational design with experimental validation, these systems can be precisely optimised to deliver exceptionally durable, cost-effective, and environmentally sustainable asphalt materials, with the potential to revolutionise road infrastructure maintenance. This project aims to develop advanced bio-based capsules with rejuvenating agents, designed using AI-enhanced computational methods and experimentally validated, to establish a fundamental understanding of their structure–property relationships to promote adaptive self-healing asphalt. We will adopt a bottom-up methodology based on multiscale experimental testing, combined with a suite of AI-enhanced computational approaches. These will include machine learning for property prediction, generative models for inverse design, and physics-informed neural networks (or Gaussian predictors) to integrate experimental data with physical constraints, enabling the design and optimisation of bio-based capsules for self-healing asphalt materials.

(Please note that International applicants will be required to hold a SUIPRES scholarship, with further guidance to follow if shortlisted.)

Funding 

Covers full tuition, £21,805 stipend (2026/27), plus up to £1,000 yearly for research costs.

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