Don’t crush concrete, reuse it! Designing new structures with saw-cut reused concrete pieces.

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• Célia Küpfer, EPFL
• Friday 20 October 2023, 15:00-16:00
• CivEng Seminar Room (1-33) (Civil Engineering Building).

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Jamie Clarkson.

Today, discarded concrete structures that are structurally still sound are crushed into aggregates, causing the loss of their structural capacities, embodied energy, and history. Since concrete is simultaneously the most used and discarded construction material, more sustainable strategies should be rapidly developed and implemented. One strategy is the reuse of large concrete pieces carefully extracted from discarded structures in new structures.

This presentation first introduces the unknown history of structural reuse of concrete in architecture via more than 50 precedents built in Europe since the 1960s, including up to 7-story high buildings. As most precedents reused prefabricated panels, new design strategies to reuse cast-in-place concrete are then introduced. One of them reuses small blocks under compression and has been used to build an arch footbridge. Another strategy optimises the reuse of long pieces in bending. This approach is used to build a 9kgCO2-per-m2 load-bearing office floor mock-up, combining reused steel profiles and concrete pieces, thus opening doors for unprecedented carbon savings in floor construction. .

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https://cam-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/89120663558?pwd=UTRMNnZPbDVGdWVXWU41S3NCaWFrUT09

Meeting ID: 891 2066 3558 Passcode: 645190

This talk is part of the Engineering Department Structures Research Seminars series.

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