## 3 The MibaLeb Project at a Glance  
Engineering infrastructure is exposed to aging, which is a process of degradation. There are numerous examples that can be provided in that regard, where the higher the investment for the infrastructure is, the higher the attention regarding aging becomes. An excellent example in that regard is nuclear engineering infrastructure, such as nuclear power plants. Nuclear power plants are exposed to a harsh loading environment. This includes pressure, temperature, irradiation, corrosion, humidity, to just name a few. This loading leads to mechanical loads on the one side resulting in fatigue and/or creep and into material transformation such as hardening, softening, martensitic transformation, embrittlement, corrosive spalling, deposition and possibly more on the other. All of those conditions and possibly much more have been considered in the design rules set for this nuclear engineering infrastructure including its operational life. Design loads applied have been additionally based on safety factors carefully selected and established in the respective guidelines and standards. However, today, where much of the nuclear engineering infrastructure is coming to the end of its operational design life, the question arises: Has this infrastructure truly achieved its real operational life? To get this question answered in the context of nuclear engineering, requires an evaluation concept to be established, which is by far not available today. However, some inheritance could be taken in that regard from aviation, where the assessment of aging aircraft became virulent after the Aloha Airlines flight 243 accident in 1988. To get such an infrastructure's residual life assessment established requires a large amount of information to be gathered and processed, and a further set of instruments to be made available, that would allow the infrastructure's actual condition to be diagnosed and its residual operational life including maintenance plans to be prognosed. Compared to the original design rules for such an aging infrastructure established decades before, those new maintenance and hence residual life design rules would be based on the application of the latest knowledge and technology and would take better advantage of the infrastructure's potential without compromising its safety. The information required to be gathered for such new design and maintenance rules may include the original design rules, maintenance and inspection recordings, and any data being recorded during load tests, material testing, microscopical analysis, non-destructive testing and possibly others. The instruments to be made available for the enhanced'redesign' are on the one hand numerical tools allowing a structure's geometry, its loading performance, stress, strain and thermal distribution, damage incubation and progression--and hence degradation, and finally the way on how inspection could be made in the longer term. The other part of instruments includes sensing devices to be implemented onto or into the infrastructure considered, allowing loads, temperature, pressure and potential degradation to emerge at critical locations over the infrastructure's residual life to be recorded. This task revisiting an infrastructures design and maintenance is a tremendous one, which cannot be solved within a single project but does rather represent a paradigm change. Along this huge task, the Mibaleb project has been established, looking into a specific example as a showcase on how to get the larger task of nuclear engineering infrastructure's residual life tackled in the longer term. The project that started in 2016 and is now in its second phase, is a collaborative initiative between the five partners Gesellschaft fur Anlagen- und Reaktorsicherheit (GRS), LZfPQ at Saarland University, MPA of Stuttgart University, WPT of TU Dortmund University and WWHK of University of Applied Sciences Kaiserslautern, funded by the German Ministry of Economic Affairs (BMWi) within its national nuclear safety R&D program.