Innovative concrete

A joint research project is identifying the most promising candidates, and how best to use them.

A joint research project is identifying the most promising candidates, and how best to use them.

The university of East London’s concrete lab is formulating new self-healing mixes, and pushing them to their limit.

Crushed waste seashells can be used as aggregate to create permeable concrete surfaces – an ingenious, local solution for flood-prone coastal areas

A small, unusually shaped concrete dwelling is attracting attention at the 2023 Venice Biennale of Architecture – the result of a partnership between the Norman Foster Foundation and Holci

In 2006 a project co-led by Loughborough University’s Professor Simon Austin became one of the first in the world to research the possibility that concrete could be 3D printed. 

We printed the entire envelope in one piece, on site, in three weeks
 

Looking a little like giant dice, the five concrete cubes on Teats Hill Beach, Plymouth, are an ongoing experiment in how to encourage marine life to inhabit man-made coastal environments.

Concrete can support plant and animal life in surprising and often beautiful ways. Researchers are using it as durable substrate, robust shelter, even a source of nutrients for many different creatures from the smallest to the most useful to the most endangered.

A Cambridge start-up is using bacteria to create cement-free concrete. Now they just have to prove that these tiny microbes can work at scale…

A Cambridge university spin-out has developed a way to produce new, potentially emissions-free cement from recycled concrete

Here, next to HC’s largest plant in Morocco, are row upon row of long plastic tubes filled with a carefully mixed cocktail of algae and brine. Waste CO2 from the cement plant is bubbled through the water and the algae thrive on it, absorbing up to twice their own weight in the gas as they grow and reproduce.

This new manufacturing technique combines steel and cement recycling processes and has been patented by three engineers based at Cambridge University.

Researchers in Gothenburg have brought concrete buildings one step closer to being able to store renewable energy

A research project in Northern Ireland is exploring how adding recycled carbon – in its purest form – could make better concrete

Could graphene super-charge concrete?

A new kind of permeable paving embeds recycled plastic tubes in a self-compacting cementitious material

This low carbon, ultra-high-performance concrete is shaped to encourage natural shore life and support marine biodiversity.

Heidelberg materials has developed a process for breaking down old concrete so that it can absorb the carbon emissions from cement production, using A fraction of the energy

Digital design experts at Bath are creating software tools that will be used – among other things – to power a giant 8m x 4m pin-mould in Cambridge to become bespoke formwork at the touch of a return key.

Lowering carbon

The extraordinary thing about the lump of concrete on Dr Kevin Paine’s desk is that it looks entirely normal. But this concrete used to be cracked – and it has mended itself.

Replacing cementitious materials with a carbon-negative alternative could enable carbonneutral concrete – without making any changes to the construction process

The walls of your family home could soon double-up as a battery, storing energy in its blocks. 

ZHA and EHA revisit a Roman construction technique with the latest 3D-printing technologies – using less material to do much more