Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

Climate change is an existential threat facing the world and the building infrastructure sector is one of the major contributors to greenhouse gas emissions. This threat is driving the need to develop more sustainable and environmentally responsible building materials. The concrete industry has made moves to develop more sustainable products, but there is limited or inadequate information available about how these products react in fire. Currently, manufacturers, engineers and policy makers lack the confidence to enact necessary design code changes. As one of the longest lasting building materials, concrete is still the most appropriate choice for many construction purposes; however, it is estimated that traditional production techniques account for as much as 8-9% of carbon emissions globally. As natural sources of aggregates deplete and waste concrete ends up in landfills, innovative combinations of supplementary cementing materials (SCMs) with recycled concrete aggregates (RCA) and recycled fibres or advanced fibres such as shape memory alloys (SMAs). There is an extremely limited understanding of the characteristics of these innovative and low carbon concrete materials when subjected to fire. The key research questions to be answered are: What are the properties of sustainable low carbon concrete with innovative recycled materials at high temperatures? How do the properties of these materials affect structural behaviour in realistic fire conditions? What are the best methods for design using these materials? This program will train 4 PhD students, 2 MSc students, and 5 undergraduates. Several significant international reports highly recommend that new materials be tested for fire performance before implementation. This research will use high temperature material tests with numerical modelling of structural systems to develop techniques and recommendations to better inform performance based design practices of these materials in fire. Although RCA is being used in some applications, widespread use, particularly in structural applications is inhibited, and very little is known about the impact of combining SCMs and RCAs and innovations with recycled fibres and SMAs. The research will develop novel modelling to consider how such members react as part of a structural system or frame of a building, and the level of damage that they will experience in an unwanted fire. Considering buildings in the context of a system of structures helps provide a clearer understanding of what might realistically happen in a fire. Overall, this research will reduce technical barriers regarding performance in fire of low carbon sustainable concrete.