Grants and Contributions:
Grant or Award spanning more than one fiscal year. (2017-2018 to 2022-2023)
North America is struggling to reconcile its crumbling infrastructure with 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 5% of greenhouse gas emissions globally. As natural sources of aggregates deplete and waste concrete ends up in landfills, researchers have begun to consider alternative materials such as supplementary cementing materials (SCMs) and/or recycled concrete aggregates (RCA). Furthermore, durability (and sustainability through longer lasting structures) can be enhanced with advanced materials such as non-corroding fibre reinforced polymers (FRPs). There is an extremely limited understanding of the characteristics of these materials (e.g., durable FRPs and sustainable concretes) when subjected to fire.
The key research questions to be answered are: What are the properties of sustainable concrete at high temperatures? How do these properties affect overall behaviour in realistic fire conditions? How do structural systems with FRP and sustainable concrete perform in fire? What are the best methods for design using these materials? This program will train 4 PhD students, 2 MSc students, and 4 undergraduates .
The World Trade Center report highly recommended 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. The research will develop novel modelling to consider how members react as part of a structural system of a building in a holistic approach, and the level of damage that they will experience in an unwanted fire. Looking at 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 sustainable concrete combined with FRPs.