Professor Liberato Ferrara & Dr Estefania Cuenca Asensio - Forging the path to a Sustainable Built Environment: Shifting perspectives and practices in Concrete Structures

IAS Visiting Fellows Professor Liberato Ferrara & Dr Estefania Cuenca Asensio each deliver a seminar on their research, in a session fully titled “Forging the path to a Sustainable Built Environment: Shifting perspectives and practices in Concrete Structures" - Prof Liberato Ferrara - “A holistic approach to sustainability of concrete: upgrading the perspective from material to structural design and life cycle assessment.” The talk introduces a novel conceptual design approach for concrete structures within a holistic life cycle framework. Key to adopting material innovations in the construction industry, this conceptual design approach breaks from the traditional structural performance assessment based solely on the misleading metrics of material unit, volume, cost and environmental impact at the time of construction. This overcomes current challenges with Ultra High-Performance Concretes, often seen as extremely high strength, without considering their exceptional durability and the implications in the asset's design, construction, use and maintenance. Dr Estefania Cuenca-Asensio - “Towards a more sustainable built environment. Recent experiences on concrete recycling.” This seminar discusses recent experiences implementing circular economy concepts in the concrete construction industry. The research carried out ranges from the recycling of Ultra-High-Performance Concrete (UHPC), intended as construction and demolition waste using different fractions of recycled aggregate obtained from crushed concrete, in substitution of both natural aggregates and cement, to the recycling of Coal Mine Waste Geomaterials (CMWG). Recent results of the investigations that addressed the feasibility of the proposed technologies will be shown. For more information about the IAS, please visit - https://www.lboro.ac.uk/research/ias #sustainability #concrete #recycling