The alarming condition of civil infrastructures in the US has been well documented. It has also been documented that about 50% of current repairs in the field fail, requiring costly re-repairs. Beyond economics, repeated repairs pose a high cost to the environment and to transportation mobility. Repair failure can be traced to the brittleness of repair mortars and their tendency to delaminate from the substrate. In this project, the team proposes a ductile fiber reinforced cement based composite that suppresses brittle fracture and delamination, and that can undergo self-healing, when damaged. This material, once applied, can permanently protects the original infrastructure and extend its service life.
By introducing an engineered cementitious composite (ECC) material into the civil infrastructure industry, the tam expects broad impacts on a number of fronts. These include lowering lifecycle costs of infrastructure maintenance, enhancing user mobility on transportation infrastructure, and reducing environmental costs and impacts caused by the construction and repeated repairs of civil infrastructure. The proposed team has developed ECCs with different functionalities, including lightweight, low stiffness, and self-healing ECC. Lightweight ECC has a density about 40% that of normal concrete. This translates directly to a reduced pavement slab weight by the same percentage, transport cost from precast yard to construction site, and hoisting machine capacity requirement during installation. Recently, a low E-stiffness ECC was developed using recycled tire-rubber in place of rigid aggregates in ECC. This material stiffness reduction translates into a slab stiffness reduction by the same percentage. Self-healing translates into a unique zero-maintenance feature for next-generation pavement slabs.
This project provides training in entreprenuiership. The goal is to learn the process of creating a hypothesis based business canvas through a team effort that includes an entreprenuierial lead, a business mentor, and the PI. This project allows the team to conduct a large number of interviews with stakeholders of multiple market segments. Our particular project is focused on a ductile fiber reinforced cementitious composite that addresses needs in markets such as infrastructure repair and rehabilitation, and new construction such as public roads and bridges, and private sector parking structures. We investigated these market segments, the players, value propositions, and revenues and cost. The team learns the process of developing hypothesis, and testing them through listening to interviewees. Although our team concludes that the economics do not work out in favor of an immediate entry, we see potentials of beach head market segments that could allow a meaningful buisness lauch. In this project, one graduate student is trained on the business canvas approach and developed a stronger appreciation of the challenges of launching a start-up, as well as a deeper sense of the purpose of research. This project will further shape the orientation of future research directions so that research project outcomes may have a larger opportunity to address market needs.
