We need new sustainable concrete with green binders and recycled aggregates from concrete and other waste stream – but how to design new materials ensuring the necessary performance criteria?
In construction practice the properties of the composite ‘concrete’ are actually not measured, only the performance. A lot of research on concrete focusses on processing and composition of new binder systems. Huge steps have already been achieved to make the concrete industry more sustainable by using (partly) replacement of cement. Application of recycled aggregates in concrete is an additional step towards circular concrete. The interplay (ITZ) between binder and aggregates (or fibres), especially when we use alternatives for them, is not yet understood. Actually the behaviour of the ITZ is the most important property of the composite if we want to design the performance of concrete.
MAGICON: MAterials Genome engineering for re-Inventing CONcrete will follow a new approach - using properties and behaviour of the ITZ as a fingerprint of concrete to understand and design the performance of the composite with various new ingredients – towards sustainable concrete.
In MAGICON we propose a completely new philosophy for developing and designing concrete. We aim to conceptualize a strategy based on materials genome engineering that combines Experimental tools, Computational tools and Digital data. The MAGICON philosophy should make it possible to select and combine ingredients for concrete that result in optimized properties and behaviour. The need for reinventing concrete comes from the urge to use greener and more environmental friendly binder systems and alternative aggregate particles mainly from recycled materials to work towards a circular economy. The quality and, short and long term performance of concrete is governed by the interplay of binder and aggregates. Especially the connection between both, called Interfacial Transition Zone (ITZ), determines mechanical and transport properties of the composite. The ITZ is actually the finger print of the material and forms the basis in the MAGICON framework to redesign new concretes. To be able to characterize the ITZ and incorporate the results in the design philosophy the following challenges that never have been tried before should be overcome:
(1) Develop a method to produce small scale samples including particles, matrix and ITZ which are representative for the composite, including its eigenstresses that are always present in all the phases.
(2) Develop testing techniques for measuring mechanical and transport properties and the combined effect of mechanics and transport on the small scale samples.
(3) Develop smart technologies for improving ITZ properties.
(4) Understand, predict and tailor the results of the microscale testing by using deterministic models for upscaling.
(5) Develop a strategy for creating data-sets from experiments, combined with smart numerical modelling that feed into ML systems for validating the behaviour of new sustainable concrete.
- WP1 and WP2 makes binder-aggregate samples to study mechanics and transport mechanisms. The same specimens need to be used in both WPs to study the interaction between the mechanisms.
- WP3 studies smart improvements of ITZ for various binder-aggregate systems and connects these to WP1 and WP2.
- WP4 develops models to simulate the processes studied in WP1 and WP2 and assists in optimizing the test procedures based on the outcome of the modelling.
- WP5 takes microstructural images from WP1 and WP2 and generates a larger set of microstructures based in the ingredients of binder and aggregates. These microstructure sets feed into the modelling work of WP4. The results of the modelling in WP4 of the mechanical and transport mechanisms on the aggregate-binder systems feed again in the AI work in WP5 to validate the performance at the composite (and ultimately at the structural) level.