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The building and construction sector remains one of the largest contributors to global climate change, thus the industry is focusing on reducing the embodied emissions from materials and minimizing operational energy through superior building envelope performance. As the industry transitions from traditional products to advanced bio-based materials, the requirements for measurement precision, dynamic response tracking, and environmental simulation have surpassed the capabilities of legacy instrumentation. Modern l...

To increase the adoption of recycled plastics in the construction industry and to make this material economically viable, it is of outmost importance to develop technological processes that can make contaminated or dirty plastics useful. This study applies an Euler-Lagrange numerical approach to evaluate the suitability of injection moulds for optimized structural elements made from contaminated recycled polyethylene and to check if the mould shapes are compatible with a normal injection technological process. The...

Following the increased use of sealing structures built in order to isolate historically polluted sites or to repair infiltrations inflicted to the levee of dams, it emerged the need to choose the right materials for constructing barriers using cutoff wall technique. The objective of this paper is to assess the range of suitable material combinations (water, cement and bentonite) in order to attain proper compressive strength, permeability and ductility requirements of such a structure. This paper proposes the rep...

When studying the mechanical behavior of hydrated binders, it is necessary to prevent hydration contraction tensile failure in order to properly characterize the mechanical properties of the material. This is regulated by standards for cement testing, however for the case of water-cement-bentonite mixtures the influence of standard sand is not thoroughly studied. Since the hydration shrinkage and water suction is different for cement and bentonite, a range of eleven combinations of water-cement-bentonite were used...