Ageing & Remaining-Life Modelling
Classifying how engineered materials degrade, then estimating remaining service life from physical evidence rather than age alone — validated on buried pipe.
Predictive Maintenance · Asset Management · Machine Learning
Pakdad
Langroudi
I turn operational data from ageing infrastructure into decisions about what to repair, replace, or leave alone — combining machine learning, physical simulation and materials analysis. Proven on district heating networks; the methods travel.
01 — About
What I do
I work where data science meets physical infrastructure. My research builds predictive maintenance and asset management methods: models that estimate how far a buried, hard-to-inspect asset has moved through its service life, and frameworks that turn that estimate into a defensible decision about intervention.
The work runs the whole chain — instrumenting lab experiments and writing the software that drives them, characterising material ageing by spectroscopy and X-ray microscopy, simulating thermal and mechanical loading history, and training models on years of operational time-series data.
A recurring thread is taking measurement techniques to problems they have not been used for. I brought X-ray microscopy, laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy and infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR / FT-NIR) to the study of polyurethane foam ageing in pre-insulated pipes — none of which had been applied to this material for this purpose — and developed the processing algorithms myself, because no laboratory software existed that could do the analysis.
District heating networks have been my proving ground. The underlying problem — deciding when ageing assets you cannot easily inspect need attention, and justifying that call with evidence — is common to water, gas, power and transport infrastructure alike.
Areas of experience
Skills & competencies
Modelling & data
Signal, spectra & images
Instrumentation & engineering software
Working environment
Work experience
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2019 – now
Research Associate, Infrastructure Engineering
HafenCity Universität Hamburg
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2016 – 2019
Student Assistant, Data Analysis & Software Development
HafenCity Universität Hamburg
Education
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2019 – now
PhD candidate — Predictive Maintenance
HafenCity Universität Hamburg
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2016 – 2019
M.Sc. — Resource Efficiency in Architecture and Planning
HafenCity Universität Hamburg
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2014 – 2016
M.Sc. — Architecture
Politecnico di Milano — Piacenza
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2007 – 2012
B.Sc. — Architectural Engineering
Azad University — Shiraz
International roles & recognition
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current
Contributor — IEA DHC Annex TS6
Status Assessment, Ageing, Lifetime Prediction and Asset Management of District Heating Pipes — international expert group spanning Austria, Denmark, Germany, Italy, South Korea and Sweden.
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to 2023
Contributor — IEA DHC Annex TS4
Digitalisation of District Heating and Cooling. Co-author of the final guidebook, a ~40-contributor international collaboration.
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Holcim Study Award for Sustainability
Awarded for work on automated characterisation of heterogeneous construction materials.
Languages
Off the clock
02 — Research
Lines of work
“What I love about science is that as you learn, you don’t really get answers. You just get better questions.”
Loading-History Reconstruction & Simulation
Recovering the load an asset has already absorbed when nobody recorded it — back-simulation over sparse sensor data, so decisions rest on the real duty history.
Automated Materials Characterisation
Laser spectroscopy plus classification to quantify heterogeneous materials automatically — replacing slow, manual sample preparation. Award-recognised.
- Automated Distinction between Cement Paste and Aggregates of Concrete Using LIBS
- Holcim Study Award for Sustainability 2019
Mechanical Testing & Lab Instrumentation
Destructive testing to failure, with the acquisition software and rigs built in-house — the ground truth the models are calibrated against.
03 — Publications
Selected publications
Fifteen peer-reviewed articles, conference papers and reports — nine of them as first author — on pipe ageing, thermal simulation, asset management and materials analysis.
As first author
- 2026
- 2026
- 2026
- 2025
- 2025
- 2022
- 2021
- 2021
- 2020
Co-authored & contributed
- 2026
- 2026
- 2025
- 2024
- 2024
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2023
Guidebook for the Digitalisation of District Heating: Transforming Heat Networks for a Sustainable Future
Work up to 2022 was published under the name Pourbozorgi Langroudi. Both forms resolve to the same ORCID record.
04 — Contact
Get in touch
Happy to talk about predictive maintenance, asset management, or anything data-shaped — in any infrastructure sector.
me@pakdad.comCompleting my PhD and open to new opportunities from 2027 — R&D, energy transition and infrastructure data roles, in industry or the public sector.