Development of sustainable, innovative and energy-efficient concrete, based on the integration of all-waste materials: SUS-CON panels for building applications

The building sector requires the worldwide production of 4 billion tonnes of cement annually, consuming more than 40% of global energy and accounting for about 8% of the total CO2 emissions. The SUS-CON project aimed at integrating waste materials in the production cycle of concrete, for both ready-mixed and pre-cast applications, resulting in an innovative light-weight, ecocompatible and cost-effective construction material, made by all-waste materials and characterized by enhanced thermal insulation performance and low embodied energy and CO2. Alkali activated “cementless” binders, which have recently emerged as eco-friendly construction materials, were used in conjunction with lightweight recycled aggregates to produce sustainable concrete for a range of applications. This paper presents some results from the development of a concrete made with a geopolymeric binder (alkali activated fly ash) and aggregate from recycled mixed plastic. Mix optimisation was achieved through an extensive investigation on production parameters for binder and aggregate. The mix recipe was developed for achieving the required fresh and hardened properties. The optimised mix gave compressive strength of about 7 MPa, flexural strength of about 1.3 MPa and a thermal conductivity of 0.34 W/mK. Fresh and hardened properties were deemed suitable for the industrial production of precast products. Precast panels were designed and produced for the construction of demonstration buildings. Mock-ups of about 2.5 x 2.5 x 2.5 m were built at a demo park in Spain both with SUS-CON and Portland cement concrete, monitoring internal and external temperatures. Field results indicate that the SUS-CON mock-ups have better insulation. During the warmest period of the day, the measured temperature in the SUS-CON mock-ups was lower.

Utilisation of Glass Reinforced Plastics as Cost Effective Alternative to Traditional Materials in Access Panel Design for Waste Water Treatment Plants

Composites are fast becoming a cost effective option when considering the design of engineering structures in a broad range of applications. If the strength to weight benefits of these material systems can be exploited and challenges in developing lower cost manufacturing methods overcome, then the advanced composite systems will play a bigger role in the diverse range of sectors outside the aerospace industry where they have been used for decades.
This paper presents physical testing results that showcase the advantages of GRP (Glass Reinforced Plastics), such as the ability to endure loading with minimal deformation. The testing involved is a cross comparison of GRP grating vs. GRP encapsulated foam core. Resulting data gained within this paper will then be coupled with design optimization (utilising model simulation) to bring forward layup alterations to meet the specified load classifications involved.

Dynalog: an automated dynamic analysis framework for characterizing android applications

Android is becoming ubiquitous and currently has the largest share of the mobile OS market with billions of application downloads from the official app market. It has also become the platform most targeted by mobile malware that are becoming more sophisticated to evade state-of-the-art detection approaches. Many Android malware families employ obfuscation techniques in order to avoid detection and this may defeat static analysis based approaches. Dynamic analysis on the other hand may be used to overcome this limitation. Hence in this paper we propose DynaLog, a dynamic analysis based framework for characterizing Android applications. The framework provides the capability to analyse the behaviour of applications based on an extensive number of dynamic features. It provides an automated platform for mass analysis and characterization of apps that is useful for quickly identifying and isolating malicious applications. The DynaLog framework leverages existing open source tools to extract and log high level behaviours, API calls, and critical events that can be used to explore the characteristics of an application, thus providing an extensible dynamic analysis platform for detecting Android malware. DynaLog is evaluated using real malware samples and clean applications demonstrating its capabilities for effective analysis and detection of malicious applications.