The Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE) recently held an award ceremony in London, where a research paper by the team of Professor Liu Songyu of Southeast University, Chairman of the Jiangsu Society for Geotechnical Mechanics and Engineering, received the 2024 Telford Premium Award. This award, conferred by the Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE), founded in 1818, aims to recognize research achievements and scholars who have made outstanding contributions in civil engineering and related fields, and is the highest recognition for research achievements and scholars of significant influence in the field of civil engineering.

The award-winning paper is "Shear creep behaviour of soil-structure interfaces under thermal cyclic loading" (2023, 13, 22–28), published by Professor Liu Songyu's team in the internationally renowned journal Géotechnique Letters. The authors of the paper include doctoral student Guo Yimu, joint-training co-supervisor Professor Ali Golchin of Delft University of Technology, Professor Liu Songyu of Southeast University, and others.

The paper, supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China project (No. 41972269) led by Professor Liu Songyu, presents the first experimental study of the coupled mechanical behavior of the pile-soil interface under initial shear stress and thermal cycling. The research team used a high-precision temperature-controlled shear box to conduct a series of heating and cooling cycles and shear tests on the pile-soil interface under initial shear stress. The study found that: (1) under the condition of constant shear stress, the interface shear strain continuously increases with thermal cycling, confirming the coupling effect between shear loading and thermal loading; (2) thermal cycling hardly changes the ultimate bearing capacity of the pile-soil interface; (3) after thermal cycling, the shear stiffness of the pile-soil interface increases, recovering to the initial shear stiffness level. This study reveals the loading state and thermo-mechanical response patterns of energy piles under real service conditions, providing important theoretical support for the structural and functional design of energy piles.

In recent years, Professor Liu Songyu's team has devoted itself to technological innovation for low-carbon geotechnical engineering and has made significant progress in in-situ testing and low-carbon reinforcement technologies. The team has invented a series of low-carbon reinforcement and carbon sequestration technologies, which have been successfully applied in engineering, providing strong support for the low-carbon transformation of China's civil engineering and transportation sectors and for achieving the national dual-carbon strategic goals.