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In the 21st century, adequate habitat and functioning infrastructure are critical for global societal and economic stability. In addition, growing urbanisation and environmental pollution cause challenges to societies.
With increasing velocity, humanity faces that the current way of living is not sustainable. Thus, habitat,infrastructure, urbanisation, environment and sustainability are definitively among the most striking challenges of the 21st century.
By consulting, planning, building, maintaining, exploiting and processing of global resources, civil engineers contribute significantly to the existence of these challenges. This is a high responsibility, but due to the heavy involvement, together with adjacent disciplines such as architecture, geosciences, chemistry,
physics, environmental sciences and economics, civil engineers also hold the key to mitigate these challenges and provide a brighter global future.
Solutions towards greener, more sustainable and economically viable materials do exist, and there is ongoing research on how greener technologies can contribute to better livelihood and economic growth, but their level of implementation is limited, a major reason for which is that these approaches require more fundamental understanding rather than standard application.
In many regions of the world the urbanisation process is accelerating dramatically. This puts pressure on urban planners but also politics to develop strategies for sustainable city growth. With the rapidly increasing demand for living space in urban areas, cities typically grow vertically. This is largely driven by real estate markets and sometimes also by the desire for status symbols.
Certainly, vertical urban growth makes sense, when horizontal growth destroys important flora and Fauna (e.g. in rain forest regions), but in many cases vertical growth is result of real-estate business and Expansion limitation due to state or country borders. However, economics and borders are made by humans. They follow human-made rules. Gravity does not. Therefore, from a point of view of sustainable materials and resourceuse, the trending vertical growth of cities may come under scrutiny.
The following aspects should be considered, when a decision is taken between a new quarter with limited number of storeys or a new skyscraper.
Sustainability means meeting the needs of today without compromising the needs of the next generations. How can we meet the needs of the next generations, if we do not even know what these needs are? If we do not listen to the next generation and learn from them? Do we even meet the needs of today for everyone on earth?
Innovation, science and engineering are driving forces to mastering the global challenges of the next decades. The basis is education. ISEE stands for Innovation, Science, Engineering and education. This book summarises the presentations, discussions and Statements that were made during the ISEE-Africa conference held in Nairobi in 2019 from January 30 to February 1.
The ISEE conference is a gathering of international researchers, scholars, and students, who came together to discuss jointly relevant topics related to better education for the engineers and architects of the future.
Today, we know that the climate change is real. Many regions in the world are already suffering significantly, and the only way for humanity to overcome the challenges is to develop more sustainable technologies to the benefit of the entire global society. However, sustainable technologies require for deeper understanding, more conscious thinking, and smarter engineering. The only way how this can be achieved is to educate the developers, the decision makers, the engineers of tomorrow in a more knowledge driven way, and to equip them with the assertiveness required for the implementation.
In this book, topics of construction and sustainable materials are linked to educational challenges. It addresses teachers, academic and political decision makers, and change drivers. The specific objective is to be critical, thought-provoking and inspiring. This way, we do hope that the book can deliver credible solution strategies for enhanced education for a new generation of decision makers with higher awareness of global and environmental challenges as well as innovation potentials.
Urbanisation, habitat, environment, infrastructure and sustainability are major global challenges of the 21st century. By planning, exploiting of resources, building, and maintaining, civil engineers and relevant adjacent disciplines have been carrying a large responsibility for the existing environmental problems. Civil engineers are responsible for 70% of all material uses in the world, and civil construction has been dominating the growth of the developing world for the next decades, with enormous impact on the global climate as well as the distribution of wealth and quality of living in the world.
Today a variety of sustainable construction concepts have been developed and discussed. Recently a UNEP report was published, which provides a comprehensive overview of the challenges and potentials in the future from a scientific and industrial point of view. Sustainable solutions based on abundantly available resources (pozzolana and clay) or on renewable instead of limited industrial by-products (e.g. agricultural waste ashes) and new construction echnologies do exist. By applying, promoting and developing the implementation of the existing knowledge into real life constructions, civil engineers also hold the key for the mitigation of the global challenges. Using best practice sustainable construction solutions is particularly of highest importance in the developing world, since the implementation at an early stage creates the highest leverage for positive effects.
Why Africa can spearhead innovative and sustainable cement and concrete technologies globally
(2016)
The perception of concrete in the society as well as in the politics is rather negative. This becomes obvious in the fact that the phrase “concrete jungle” has become synonym for hapless living with no perspectives. In politics and research funding, it is also not easy to create a broader audience, since concrete is falsely considered as old-fashioned material that is sufficiently understood today and does not need further considerations, particularly compared to allegedly newer materials. However, particularly since the last two decades the technology has completely changed. Binders of today are no more the same binders as used before, and concrete mixture compositions of today diverge quite significantly from compositions in the past. There is little understanding world-wide about that. This causes that potentials the concrete technology bears are wasted.
In the broadly found opinion that concrete is old-fashioned and ugly, it is ignored that architectural sins are not inherent to the material, which actually is extremely versatile and CO2-friendly compared to all other construction materials available. It is also ignored that 98% of the outer Earth’s crust are made of the elements cement and concrete are made from, and therefore it will be an illusion to believe that the complementary 2% can create materials to develop regions and infrastructures in less developed areas in the world.
For betterment in Africa the infrastructural development should have highest priority, since poor connections between settlements are responsible for enormous Price increases [2], and urban traffic congestion is responsible for an incredible loss of productivity. It is not unrealistic to assume that earners that are dependent on a car get stuck in traffic about 3-4 hours per day in cities like Lagos, Nairobi or Dar es Salaam. However, the traffic congestions do not only affect the car owners negatively but the living of the entire urban population every day.
Besides infrastructure, housing should be the other priority, since a large part of the African population does not live in adequate condition. This is a societal problem, since unequal Distribution of wealth is a major driving force for instability in societies. The latter has a global impact, since 8 many phenomena that can be observed all over the world such as political radicalism, xenophobia, terrorism, and migration can often be linked to instable societies.
However, the importance of infrastructure has an even wider range. Most African countries go through a change process recently. In order to strengthen very positive perspectives, the focus in politics and research funding is put on issues such as agriculture, energy, and health, which are without doubt extremely important issues. However, it is typically overlooked that all enhancements in these areas can only become effective, when an infrastructure is created to support the implementation of better concepts. Mobility is the key to a prosperous future, and mobility can only be granted by infrastructural construction activities. Hence, compared to many other regions in the world, cement and concrete technologies have a significantly higher relevance in Africa.
The SUSAN-project aimed at developing a sustainable and safe strategy for nutrient recovery from sewage sludges using thermal treatment. Mono-incineration of the sludges completely destructs the organic pollutants in a first step. The incineration residues are ashes with a high phosphorus content that still contain heavy metal compounds above the limits for agricultural use. Furthermore, phosphorus in the ashes exhibits low bioavailability - a disadvantage in farming. Therefore, in a second thermochemical step heavy metals are removed and phosphorus transferred into mineral phases available for plants. The principle of the SUSAN-project is the separation of the small heavy metals fraction from the ashes to receive a phosphorus rich product suited as raw material for fertilisers that also contains SiO2, CaO, Al2O3, Fe2O3, MgO and K2O.
The thermochemical process is based on evaporation of volatile heavy metal chlorides at 850 - 1000 °C. The sewage sludge ashes are mixed with chlorine donors such as MgCl2 or KCl, grained and treated in a thermal aggregate e.g. a rotary furnace. At the same time a transfer of non soluble P-compounds into Mineral phases available for plants takes place.
Besides technological development of the thermochemical process, the products fertilisation performance, the product design, the market for the products and the sustainability of the whole process chain are emphasised in the SUSAN-project.
Welcome to the 2nd International Conference on Advances in Cement and Concrete Technology in Africa (ACCTA 2016), January 27– 29, 2016, held at White Sands Hotel, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.
The first ACCTA conference that took place in January 2013 in Johannesburg was a result of an African-European collaborative research project. Due to the success of this conference, it was announced that a triennial international conference is necessary, with the next conference scheduled to take place once again in Johannesburg. Within the organisation of the conference, unfortunately some unforeseeable events arose, which would lead to either a delay of the conference in Johannesburg until 2018 or a change of venue. The great response from the international scientific community supported the option to maintain the originally scheduled date. With the support of the local organisation committee from the University of Dar es Salaam and the contributions from the University of the Witwatersrand and the University of Zagreb the conference was shifted to Dar es Salaam.
Despite the new boundary framework, we are extremely happy that it was possible to arrange an outstanding and excellent scientific programme. Therefore we would like to thank in particular the keynote speakers and all members of the international scientific community, as well as other delegates that supported the conference by their contributions and attendance. This shows us how significantly important the African cement and concrete market is for the entire global community.
Africa can become a spearhead for the future of construction with cement and concrete. The continent exhibits an enormous construction potential and due to the relatively short history of building with these materials, innovations can be adopted and adapted unbiased and without influence of stakeholders, traditions, and complicated networks of regulations. This is a fertile ground for the existing promising generation of engineers and decision makers for re-inventing cement and concrete in the best possible way.
There is no global optimum solution for concrete. The best solution in Africa is not the best solution in Europe or another part of the world, and the best solution in one particular African country is diverging from the best solution in another African country depending upon resources, supply chains, infrastructure, construction needs, traditions, available manpower, skills and technologies. Nevertheless, we can globally support our objectives to build future oriented and sustainable construction solutions by mutually learning from each other. In order to tackle the future challenges and build more sustainably and innovatively with concrete, we need to enhance interdisciplinary and cross-national skills and create networks between experts and decision makers globally.
ACCTA offers this kind of platform, and we are happy to announce that the conference reaches a high impact in the world. Delegates and speakers come from more than 40 countries in the world originating from all continents. Besides the technical content there will be plenary discussions on the most relevant topics of future binder technologies and standards and product safety with outstanding expert panellists.
We want to wish all delegates a successful conference and hope that this book can be a significant contribution for a future oriented and better concrete technology; in Africa and the entire world. Welcome to Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.
Welcome to the second symposium on Knowledge Exchange for Young Scientists (KEYS) in Accra, Ghana 7th – 9th June 2016. This symposium is part of a three phase series organised by BAM, and funded by VolkswagenStiftung. The KEYS symposia series offers a platform whereby young African scientists can get together with peers from Germany as well as with experienced academic engineers, industry specialists and scientists from across the globe for better implementation of research analysis in their respective fields of study. This primarily provides the opportunity to obtain further knowledge in the demand for the home-base innovation and growth of the education sector. It will also provide an opportunity to network with peers and gain relevant and objective knowledge. Therefore, the symposium offers adequate training to young scientists as well as gives an opportunity to network with key players in the cement and concrete industry, which will facilitate the fundamentals of knowledge transfer.
This second symposium focuses on solid waste management and importance of valorisation of suitable by-products for utilisation in the cement and concrete industry. Today, all over the world we can no longer draw on abundant resources, and more frequently, we need to develop innovative concepts for better and more sustainable construction. This change process needs international and interdisciplinary approaches. Hence, the symposium is seen as a spark for the generation of ideas and visions, how concrete construction can become more globally sustainable based on locally tailored concepts. The symposium includes keynote lectures from 9 international keynote speakers and technical papers from 22 young scientists, who were selected out of a high number of applicants based on the excellence of their scientific writing. The presentations of all participants as well as keynote lectures are represented in these proceedings.
We would like to thank all participants for their valuable contribution to the symposium. We are blessed to receive tremendous input from the distinguished keynote speakers and we thank them for their attendance. Last but not least, we would like to acknowledge the funding body, VolkswagenStiftung, for their support. We hope you enjoy the symposium and find your engagement valuable with the entire team in sustaining your professional development in the global world of cement and concrete.