What do the Hoover Dam, the Sydney Opera House, the Great Wall and the Pantheon have in common? They are all examples of incredibly ambitious concrete construction.
However, our most widely used building materials have an incredible carbon footprint, and their energy-intensive production accounts for 8% of global emissions. This has led engineering minds to instead turn to other building materials such as flax and various blends of environmentally friendly composite concrete.
Now, engineers at the University of Pittsburgh (Pitt) are building futuristic technology with lightweight, versatile, and adaptable smart infrastructure products that can be tailored to different builds and even generate their own electrical charge. We aim to raise it to a higher level.
“Modern societies have used concrete in construction for hundreds of years, following its initial creation by the ancient Romans,” said Pitt’s lead author, Amir Pit, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering. Aravi said. “The heavy use of concrete in our infrastructure projects highlights the need to develop a new generation of concrete materials that offer advanced functionality while being more economical and environmentally sustainable. We believe that we can achieve all these goals by introducing the metamaterials paradigm into the development of building materials.”
Metamaterials consist of a reinforced auxetic polymer lattice within a conductive cement matrix. A conductive cement reinforced with graphite powder forms the electrodes and a mechanical trigger can generate contact charging between the layers. Although it cannot generate enough power to send to the grid, it could be used to monitor damage inside concrete structures, such as in the event of an earthquake.
Physically, the metamaterial itself can be tweaked to suit your build needs, switching between flexibility, shape, and brittleness, and tested to compress up to 15% while maintaining structural integrity. can.
“This project presents the first composite metamaterial concrete with ultra-compressibility and energy-harvesting capabilities,” said Alavi. “Such a lightweight, mechanically tunable concrete system opens the door to the use of concrete in a variety of applications, such as impact-absorbing engineering materials and seismic isolation systems in airports to help slow runaway planes. can be opened.”
The team, which includes engineers from Johns Hopkins University, New Mexico State University, Georgia Tech, the Beijing Institute of Nanoenergy and Nanosystems, and the Pitt Swanson School of Engineering, believes the multifunctional concrete material will become a widely used component in infrastructure. increase. Because it is “scalable, cost-effective, and operationally self-sustaining through green harvesting energy.”
And in the future (quite literally), this smart engineering product could even power chips embedded in highways and assist self-driving cars.
However, in the near future, this study will report the need for large-scale testing and further research on how to insulate energy-recovery nanogenerator integrated materials from environmental stressors such as humidity, wet weather, and temperature changes. I’m here.
A study was published in a journal advanced materials.
Source: University of Pittsburgh
