Sustainable and Resilient Material Systems for Coastal and Offshore Infrastructure

Coastal and offshore infrastructure, including ports, sea walls, bridge substructures, nearshore transport assets, and offshore energy facilities, must reduce embodied carbon while improving resilience to harsh marine exposure and increasing hazards. Conventional materials and construction practices often cause high emissions, frequent repairs, and shorter service life due to chloride ingress, wet dry cycling, abrasion, biofouling, and combined fatigue, impact, and cyclic loading.Recent advances in construction materials and systems enable greener, longer-lasting, and easier-to-maintain marine infrastructure. Innovations in cementitious materials such as low-clinker binders, durability-enhanced mixes, and carbonation or CO2 mineralization approaches can lower carbon while improving marine resistance. Corrosion-resistant reinforcement and strengthening, including fiber-reinforced polymer (FRP) materials for reinforcement, confinement, repair, and hybrid systems, can further reduce corrosion-related deterioration and extend service life. Protective technologies, self-healing and bio-inspired methods, and performance-based durability design add additional pathways.This Research Topic aims to bring together cutting-edge research on materials design, performance optimization, constructability, and sustainable life cycle management for coastal and offshore infrastructure under practical constraints such as limited resources, labor availability, and challenging site conditions. We encourage contributions that integrate high-performance material systems with emerging technologies, such as prefabrication and automation, digital twins, sensing and structural health monitoring, and artificial intelligence for inspection and maintenance planning, to enable co-optimization of durability, safety, cost, constructability, and environmental performance. Experimental, simulation-based, field-monitoring, and theoretical studies are all welcome, with particular interest in work addressing urgent engineering needs across coastal protection, offshore renewable energy, marine transportation, and other harsh-environment infrastructure.We welcome submissions on:• Low-carbon and durable cementitious materials for marine exposure (e.g., alternative binders, supplementary cementitious materials, seawater/sea-sand feasibility where appropriate, crack control, permeability and chloride transport reduction, carbonation/CC2 mineralization routes);• Corrosion-resistant reinforcement and strengthening systems, including FRP materials and hybrid solutions, with emphasis on long-term durability, interfaces/bond, anchorage, and marine repair/retrofit applications;• Protection and durability enhancement strategies (e.g., coatings and barriers, anti-biofouling concepts, cathodic protection integration, self-healing or bio-inspired/biomineralization approaches, multi-functional materials);• Performance-based design, modeling, and service-life prediction under marine multi-hazard conditions (wave–wind–impact, fatigue, abrasion/scour, temperature and moisture gradients), including reliability methods and durability-informed design frameworks;• Green construction and lifecycle management technologies for coastal/offshore projects (modularization/prefabrication, accelerated curing suitable for marine sites, underwater repair methods, digital twins, monitoring-enabled maintenance, AI-assisted inspection and decision support, LCA/LCC integration). Topic editors: KEFAN WENG, Zhiwen Zhang, Lijie Chen, Shiwen Han, Zhi-Hao Hao, Qiqi Zou, Kexuan Li Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/78951/sustainable-and-resilient-material-systems-for-coastal-and-offshore-infrastructure