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A special issue of Sustainability (ISSN 2071-1050). This special issue belongs to the section "Sustainable Materials".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 December 2021) | Viewed by 10900

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Prof. Dr. Hany El Naggar

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Guest Editor

Department of Civil and Resource Engineering, Dalhousie University, Halifax, NS B3H 4R2, Canada
Interests: soil–structure interaction (SSI); buried structures; tunneling; bridges; seismic analysis and design; green construction materials; ground improvement techniques
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Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Now more than any other time, the world needs to promote sustainable construction materials and practices. Our world has limited natural resources and is experiencing an ever-growing built environment at an unprecedented rate. Hence engineers and practitioners must consider the environmental, economic, and social sustainability of their structures early during the design phase and later during the construction. The world needs to adopt an approach that identifies certain recycled materials as commodities that can be used in new construction projects, thus avoiding the need to mine and process virgin materials. This Special Issue aims to provide a collection of timely and high- quality papers on structural engineering and sustainable civil construction to gain further insights into the crucial issue of sustainability and the use of recycled materials in the construction of civil infrastructures.

Specific topics include, but are not limited to the following:

Recycled construction materials: their mechanical behavior and physical properties
Sustainable backfilling materials: their mechanical behavior and physical properties
Laboratory scale tests on sustainable backfilling materials
Full-scale tests involving sustainable structures
Analysis of the interaction among buried structures, sustainable or recycled backfilling material and native soil
Analysis and design of sustainable structures

Prospective authors are encouraged to send an abstract by November 15, 2020, to the Guest Editor (email: [email protected]). For the selected abstracts, the authors will be contacted by the Guest Editor and asked to prepare a full paper. All full papers will go through the regular review process, and only the ones that pass the review process will be accepted for publication.

Prof. Hany El Naggar
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

sustainable backfilling materials
recycled materials
geomaterials
sustainable infrastructures
buried structures

Published Papers (4 papers)

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Research

13 pages, 2545 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Bio-Cementation for Improving Soil Thermal Conductivity

by Liang Cheng, Natalia Afur and Mohamed A Shahin

Sustainability 2021, 13(18), 10238; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/su131810238 - 14 Sep 2021

Cited by 13 | Viewed by 2176

Abstract

A promising technology for renewable energy is energy piles used to heat and cool buildings. In this research, the effects of bio-cementation via microbially induced calcite precipitation (MICP) using mixed calcium and magnesium sources and the addition of fibres on the thermal conductivity of soil were investigated. Firstly, silica sand specimens were treated with cementation solutions containing different ratios of calcium chloride and magnesium chloride to achieve maximum thermal conductivity improvement. Three treatment cycles were provided, and the corresponding thermal conductivity was measured after each cycle. It was found that using 100% calcium chloride resulted in the highest thermal conductivity. This cementation solution was then used to treat bio-cemented soil samples containing fibres, including polyethylene, steel and glass fibres. The fibre contents used included 0.5%, 1.0% and 1.5% of the dry sand mass. The results show that the glass fibre samples yielded the highest thermal conductivity after three treatment cycles, and SEM imaging was used to support the findings. This research suggests that using MICP as a soil improvement technique can also improve the thermal conductivity of soil surrounding energy piles, which has high potential to effectively improve the efficiency of energy piles. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Structural Engineering and Sustainable Civil Construction)

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25 pages, 10704 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Evaluation of the Shear Strength Behavior of TDA Mixed with Fine and Coarse Aggregates for Backfilling around Buried Structures

by Hany El Naggar and Ali Iranikhah

Sustainability 2021, 13(9), 5087; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/su13095087 - 1 May 2021

Cited by 9 | Viewed by 1962

Abstract

Although some discarded tires are reused in various applications, a considerable number end up in landfills, where they pose diverse environmental problems. Waste tires that are shredded to produce tire-derived aggregates (TDA) can be reused in geotechnical engineering applications. Many studies have already been conducted to examine the behavior of pure TDA and soil-TDA mixtures. However, few studies have investigated the behavior of larger TDA particles, 20 to 75 mm in size, mixed with various types of soil at percentages ranging from 0% to 100%. In this study, TDA was mixed with gravelly, sandy, and clayey soils to determine the optimum soil-TDA mixtures for each soil type. A large-scale direct shear box (305 mm × 305 mm × 220 mm) was used, and the mixtures were examined with a series of direct shear tests at confining pressures of 50.1, 98.8, and 196.4 kPa. The test results indicated that the addition of TDA to the considered soils significantly reduces the dry unit weight, making the mixtures attractive for applications requiring lightweight fill materials. It was found that adding TDA to gravel decreases the shear resistance for all considered TDA contents. On the contrary, adding up to 10% TDA by weight to the sandy or clayey soils was found to increase the shear resistance of the mixtures. Adding up to 10% TDA by weight to the clayey soil also sharply increased the angle of internal friction from 18.8° to 32.3°. Moreover, it was also found that the addition of 25% TDA by weight to the gravelly or sandy soils can reduce the lateral earth pressure on buried structures by up to 20%. In comparison, adding 10% TDA to clay resulted in a 36% reduction in the lateral earth pressure. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Structural Engineering and Sustainable Civil Construction)

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17 pages, 4277 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Evaluating the Role of Geofoam Properties in Reducing Lateral Loads on Retaining Walls: A Numerical Study

by Muhammad Imran Khan and Mohamed A. Meguid

Sustainability 2021, 13(9), 4754; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/su13094754 - 23 Apr 2021

Cited by 8 | Viewed by 3466

Abstract

Expanded polystyrene (EPS) geofoam is a lightweight compressible material that has been widely used in various civil engineering projects. One interesting application of EPS in geotechnical engineering is to reduce the lateral earth pressure on rigid non-yielding retaining walls. The compressible nature of the EPS geofoam allows for the shear strength of the backfill soil to be mobilized, which leads to a reduction in lateral earth pressure acting on the wall. In this study, a finite element model is developed and used to investigate the role of geofoam inclusion between a rigid retaining wall and the backfill material on the earth pressure transferred to the wall structure. The developed model was first calibrated using experimental data. Then, a parametric study was conducted to investigate the effect of EPS geofoam density, relative thickness with respect to the wall height, and the frictional angle of backfill soil on the effectiveness of this technique in reducing lateral earth pressure. Results showed that low-density EPS geofoam inclusion provides the best performance, particularly when coupled with backfill of low friction angle. The proposed modeling approach has shown to be efficient in solving this class of problems and can be used to model similar soil-geofoam-structure interaction problems. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Structural Engineering and Sustainable Civil Construction)

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23 pages, 2172 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Optimized Design of Structure of High-Bending-Rigidity Circular Tube

by Shaoying Li and Zhongquan Qu

Sustainability 2021, 13(8), 4534; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/su13084534 - 19 Apr 2021

Cited by 2 | Viewed by 2399

Abstract

Circular tubes are widely used in daily life and manufacture under bending load. The structural parameters of a circular tube, such as its wall thickness, number and shapes of ribs, and supporting flanges, are closely related to the tube’s bending rigidity. In this study, a tube with eight ribs and a flange was optimized, in order to obtain the lowest weight, through comprehensive structural optimization. We obtained the optimal structural parameters of the tube and the influence of the structural parameters on the tube’s weight. The structural parameters of tubes with different numbers of ribs were optimized. The tube with different number of ribs had the same inner diameter, bending load, and length as the tube with eight ribs. We conducted an experiment to verify the structural optimization simulation. Different tube sizes were subsequently optimized. The optimized tube with four trapezoidal ribs and a flange reduced the weight by more than 73% while maintaining the same deformation. The weight of the optimized tube with a flange reached a stable value after four trapezoidal ribs were added. When the number of ribs was two, the weight was the largest. The analysis results were consistent with the numerical results. A new AWATR (appropriate width and thickness of ribs can improve the bending rigidity of the tubes) formula was proposed, which can effectively improve the bending rigidity of tubes. Different shapes of tubes were optimized and compared. The optimized tube with four trapezoidal ribs and a flange was the lightest and easy to manufacture. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Structural Engineering and Sustainable Civil Construction)

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