"Re-think, Re-use: agro-food and C&D waste for high-performance sustainable cementitious composites"

With the development of "mega-constructions" and especially of slender components in ever-higher buildings, new construction materials need to be more performing. At the same time, environmental problems emerged during the last decades require that the manufacturing process of traditional building material needs to be more efficient and environmentally sustainable. The question behind this research is "You can get a traditional building material with better performance and less energy consumption?” Concrete is the most artificial material produced and used in the world. In recent years, the production of cement has reached 4 billion tons, making it a process with a high-energy consumption: it is one of the main causes of the production and placing of CO2 in the atmosphere. With the increasing demand for high-performance building materials, today we are witnessing a very common phenomenon: improve the mechanical properties (compressive and flexural strength, toughness and durability are becoming increasingly important features in the new concrete technology) by aggregates and very expensive additives. An example of this is certainly the direction of the predominant research in America, which involves the use of carbon-based materials such as Carbon Nanotubes (CNTs) to meet the market needs of the new concrete. Through a simple reflection ("Concrete is a low cost material, why improve it with materials that, albeit in very small quantities, greatly affect it with their prohibitive cost?") was thus thought to use “poor” carbon-based materials. Therefore, the main theme of the present research is to obtain an enhancement of strength and toughness in traditional cement based materials by incorporating waste materials, to meet the challenge of “green” construction materials.