Can nature inspire resilience in our built environment and transform the way we engineer the world around us? The Resilient Materials 4 Life Cambridge University Research team will introduce you to the world of intelligent construction materials and how they can shape the future of infrastructure.

Slides for this lecture can be found here.

Speakers

Professor Abir Al-Tabbaa PhD CEng FICE is Professor of Geotechnical Engineering at Cambridge and a Fellow of the Institution of Civil Engineers. She is Head of the £11m EPSRC Centres for Doctoral Training in Future Infrastructure and Built Environment and a Director of the £4.9m EPSRC-funded Resilient Materials for Life (RM4L) Programme Grant. She is a leading international figure in geotechnical engineering and infrastructure materials, with more than £50m of research grants.

Her research is cross-disciplinary in the areas of ground improvement, contaminated land remediation and low carbon and biomimetic infrastructure materials. She runs a large and dynamic research group and has over 300 research publications. Alumni information: Fellow of Sidney Sussex

Dr Chrysoula Litina MEng MSc PhD is a Civil Engineer and a researcher at the University of Cambridge. She completed her PhD at the University of Cambridge focusing on the development of novel microcapsule-based self-healing cementitious materials.

She is currently the lead postdoc of the Cambridge team, of the Resilient Materials 4 Life (RM4L) Programme Grant led by Professor Abir Al-Tabbaa, aiming to create cementitious materials that adapt to their environment, develop immunity to harmful actions, self-diagnose the on-set of deterioration and self-heal when damaged.

Her work focuses on developing different strategies for self-healing material development, characterisation and up-scaling for full-scale applications.

Dr Lívia Ribeiro de Souza MSc PhD obtained her PhD at the University of Cambridge under the supervision of Professor Abir Al-Tabbaa. Her research looked at microfluidics to produce microcapsules for self-healing in cementitious materials. Currently, Livia works as a research associate at the Resilient Materials 4 Life (RM4L) project, creating materials that will adapt to their environment, develop immunity to harmful actions, self-diagnose the on-set of deterioration and self-heal when damaged. Her work focuses on using microfluidics to investigate the microencapsulation of different liquid healing agents.

Before Cambridge, Livia obtained a BSc in Chemistry (UFMG, Brazil) and an MSc in Mineral Science and Technology (CDTN, Brazil) investigating metal contamination in river and lake sediments affected by acid mine drainage.

Reading list

Self-healing concrete for low-carbon infrastructure

Al-Tabbaa, B. Lark, K. Paine, T. Jefferson, T. Embley, Smart Biomimetic Construction Materials for Next Generation Infrastructure, in: ISNGI, ICE, London, UK, 2017: pp. 1–10.

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