The project addresses the urgent need to drastically reduce CO2 emissions and to manage our natural resources more responsibly. In construction, most of the buildings are usually demolished at the end of their service life, with severe negative consequences to the environment, including generation of waste going to landfill, need to produce new structural components from scratch each time a building needs to be built, therefore increased CO2 emissions, and over-consumption of planet's finite natural resources (e.g. coal).
This project proposes novel construction methods, specifically for steel-concrete composite structures, to design buildings that can be dismantled at the end of their service life and all structural components reused in other projects. By adopting this design approach, demolition is avoided, CO2 emissions are drastically reduced since there will be no need to produce new structural components, waste will be minimised, and we will consume our resources more efficiently. Thus, the project benefits society as a result of contributing to more environmentally friendly construction procedures.
The overall objectives of the project are
1. To assess the structural behaviour of the proposed novel sustainable construction methods through experimental testing.
2. To perform numerical simulations of the proposed structural details and to exhaustively study all the parameters affecting their design.
3. To study the behaviour of buildings using the proposed technologies.
4. To propose reliable design procedures for both the construction and deconstruction of the proposed composite structures.
