I’m delighted that the hard work over the past 18 months has paid off and I’m looking forward to addressing the challenges we have set ourselves over the next five years. These have been established in order to cause a step-change in the value placed on infrastructure materials and to provide a much higher level of confidence and reliability in the performance of our infrastructure systems.
- Professor Al-Tabbaa
Abir Al-Tabbaa, Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, said the newly funded Resilient Materials 4 Life (RM4L) programme grant – announced by Science Minister, Jo Johnson – will build on the success of the existing Materials for Life (M4L) project, also funded by the EPSRC. Professor Al-Tabbaa leads the Cambridge research team collaborating with Cardiff University, the University of Bath and now the University of Bradford, as well as a large number of industry partners, with contributions of over £2million.
The programme grant RM4L will enable the team to address a number of large and significant challenges and make major advances in the realisation of intelligent infrastructure materials. Challenges include the tailoring, modelling and optimisation of the developed self-healing systems for targeted applications, which include precast slabs, repair systems, tunnel linings, basements and marine renewables.
M4L was funded from the EPSRC Ground and Structural Engineering Challenge call in 2012 following the funding of two networks: Future Infrastructure Forum (FIF) and Low Impact Materials and Innovative Engineering Solutions for the Built Environment (LimesNet). M4L developed for the first time a suite of self-healing infrastructure materials and systems using a combination of microcapsules, bacteria, shape memory polymers and vascular networks to address multi-scale physical damage in cementitious infrastructure systems.
The project culminated with the construction of the first-ever field trials application of self-healing concrete in the UK using the developed systems. This was facilitated by Costain, the lead project industry partner, on the A465 Heads of the Valleys £200m road upgrade scheme in Wales. The trials involved the construction of five retaining walls in September 2015, in which different combinations of the developed self-healing systems were embedded, together with a control panel. The walls were then subjected to damage and allowed to subsequently heal under a range of curing environments. The response of these panels in both pre- and post-healed conditions is being monitored with a range of in-situ instrumentation and visualisation techniques.
“The results obtained to date from M4L are highly promising,” said Professor Al-Tabbaa. “The M4L project has also placed the UK firmly as a leader in the global arena with core representation on the new EU COST Action – SARCOS: Self-healing As preventative Repair of COncrete Structures and the RILEM TC SHE: Self-healing concrete – its efficiency and evaluation.”
Image: M4L project field trials.
Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge Department of Engineering
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