Séminaire – Pr Geert DE SHUTTER – Vision pour l’avenir de l’industrie du béton

Le Professeur Geert DE SHUTTER (Magnel Laboratory for Concrete Research, Université de Gent -BELGIQUE), chercheur invité au GeM en juin au sein de l’équipe IEG, donnera un séminaire à l’IUT de Saint Nazaire le 9 juin 2016 à 14h00 (salle séminaire, bâtiment 17), concernant l’ERC qu’il vient d’obtenir sur les bétons du futur.

Résumé de la présentation:

Vision for Future Advancement of Concrete Industry

Concrete production processes do not take full advantage of the rheological potential of fresh cementitious materials, and are still largely labour-driven and sensitive to the human factor. The ERC Advanced Grant Project ‘SmartCast’ proposes a new concrete casting concept to transform the concrete industry into a highly automated technological industry. Currently, the rheological properties of the concrete are defined by mix design and mixing procedure without any further active adjustment during casting. The goal of the ‘SmartCast’ Project is the active control of concrete rheology during casting, and the active triggering of early stiffening of the concrete as soon as it is put in place. The ground-breaking idea to achieve this goal, is to develop concrete with actively controllable rheology by adding admixtures responsive to externally activated electromagnetic frequencies. Inter-disciplinary insights are important to achieve these goals, including inputs from concrete technology, polymer science, electrochemistry, rheology and computational fluid dynamics. In the longer term, enabling concrete casting with active control of flow and stiffening will be a totally new paradigm for concrete industry. Moving from ‘passively’ relying on evolving properties of fresh concrete, to ‘actively’ controlling rheology and stiffening will revolutionize concrete industry and bring quality levels to higher standards. The developed active rheology control will also provide a fundamental basis for the development of future-proof 3D printing techniques in concrete industry. For society, it will mean more reliable construction, with less damage cases and less failures, while better preserving the environment (reduced carbon footprint, reduced noise and vibration levels, reduced exposure of technicians to safety and health risks)