Saunda De Silva
Bachelor of Engineering, Honours, Final Year
My love for civil engineering stems from my childhood admiration of my father, a building contractor by profession who I frequently accompanied on his site visits. Each time I visited the site and witnessed the machinery and related processes, my excitement and inquisitiveness knew no bounds. I look forward to being a part of the demanding and challenging civil engineering industry, I also expect that it will be a rewarding experience, especially when I look back and see the projects completed successfully.
Properties of graphene nanoengineered mortar with waste glass.
According to the 2022 Australian National Waste Report around 1.54 million tonnes or 60kg per capita of waste glass was generated in the year 2020-2021 alone. Where only 55%-60% is recycled leaving 0.61- 0.69 million tonnes of glass going to landfills.
This study will investigate the change in fresh and hardened properties of incorporating graphene nanoplatelets (GNP) into a high dosage of waste glass with the use of 60% of glass powder as a replacement for cement and 100% of glass sand in mortar. Thereby, supplying both an environmentally sustainable and cost-effective cementitious mix design. However, agglomeration of GNPs reduces the positive impact on cement mortar therefore, dispersion of GNP plays a key role. High-shear mixing and ultrasonication were used in the dispersion of GNP and through ultraviolet-visible spectrophotometry, it was found that sonication leads to a better dispersion than high-shear mixing.
Initial testing was done on GNP with cement mortar and following this benchmark, GNP was added to waste glass mortar. Compression strength, flowability and Vicat test were conducted, and it was found that the addition of GNP to cement mortar and glass mortar has been shown to improve the compressive strength and decrease the flowability however, the increase in compression strength in glass mortar wasn’t as significant as it was with cement mortar.
