Digital Repository for faculty of Engineering

The construction sector has embraced digitalization and industrialization to boost production, reduce material consumption, and improve workmanship. The 3D-printed concrete technology (3DPCT), more broadly recognized as the design of a 3D object via a computer-aided design (CAD) model or a digital 3D model, has accelerated considerable progress in these areas in other industries. Although 3DPCT has advanced remarkably in recent years, producing an appropriate 3D printing material that improves performance while reducing material consumption, which is really important for CO2 reduction, is urgently needed. The present 3DPCT faces many obstacles, one of which is the limited range of printable concretes. To tackle this limitation, extensive studies on developing creative approaches for formulating alkali-activated materials (AAMs) for 3DPCT for modern building applications have been conducted. AAMs are maintainable substitutive binders to ordinary Portland cement. Therefore, the need to undertake a comprehensive literature review on the current status of AAM performance on 3D-printable concretes for building applications is substantial. This article comprehensively reviews the quality requirements, advantages, disadvantages, common techniques, delivery, and placement of 3DCP. This literature also delivers indepth reviews on the behaviors and the properties of AAM-based concrete composites used in 3D-printed construction. Moreover, research trends are moving toward a wide-ranging understanding concerning the economic benefits and the environmental footprints of 3DCP for building applications with AAMs as suitable concrete materials for the emerging robust eco-friendly concrete composite for digital construction constructions nowadays. Given the merits of the study, several hotspot research topics for future investigations are also provided for facilitating the wide use of 3DPCT in real applications to address rapidly the gap between demand and supply for smart and cost-effective homes for upcoming generations.
Hakim S. Abdelgader(2-2022)

The number of deteriorating bridges due to chloride-induced corrosion increases annually as does the cost of inspection, maintenance, repair and where necessary replacement. Meanwhile, budgets made available to bridge owners/managers for repair and maintenance of these bridges are reducing. To optimise and manage their budget spend, bridge owners/mangers need to rely more on rational decision making methods rather than on subjective engineering judgment. In this thesis, the author has developed a probabilistic- based model which aims to predict the lifetime performance of Reinforced Concrete (RC) structures exposed to chloride corrosive environment and consequently to optimise their lifetime management.
Omran Kenshel(11-2009)

Estimating the Reliability (Probability of Failure) of Reinforced Concrete (RC) structures in marine environments has been of major concern among researchers in recent years. While General (uniform) corrosion affects the reinforcement by causing a uniform loss of its cross-sectional area, Pitting (localized) corrosion concentrates over small areas of the reinforcement. Many studies have focused on the effect of general corrosion, the effect of pitting corrosion on the structure reliability has not been fully investigated. Furthermore, due to the variability associated with the parameters involved in the reliability estimation of the corroded structure, this paper focuses on the effect of variability of pitting corrosion on the structure reliability. The analysis also takes into consideration the Spatial Variability (SV) of key deterioration parameters often neglected in previous studies. The authors have used their experimental data in modeling SV parameters of a specific deterioration parameter. The analysis adopted here used Monte Carlo (MC) simulation technique to construct a Spatial-Time Dependent model to estimate the girder reliability. The results showed that pitting corrosion potentially has a far more aggressive effect on the structure reliability than general corrosion and that pitting corrosion affects shear resistance far more severely than it would affect flexure resistance. The analysis showed that after 50 years of service, the reduction in the beam reliability due to pitting corrosion was 51% higher than that caused by general corrosion and that considering SV has caused the reliability predicted in terms of pitting corrosion to decrease by 12%. In the case of general corrosion, the decrease in beam reliability was only about 2% for the SV scenario.
Omran Kenshel, Mohamed Sulieman (12-2021)

Cement is still the most popular binder used in buildings construction. The volume of cement production in the world since 2013 has remained at the level of approximately 4.1 billion tons. The cement production process is energy intensive and is the world’s leading emitter of carbon dioxide. Therefore, the main activities cement plants are aimed at introducing technologies changes in production of clinkier (Edwards, 2019).The construction industry is responsible for the majority of CO2 emissions to the atmosphere: the industry emits 30% of total CO2, building emits 28%, transportation is responsible for 22% of CO2, the production of building materials causes 11% of CO2 emissions, including the cement industry is responsible for around 7% of emissions CO2. Other industries are responsible for around 9% of CO2 emissions to the atmosphere (Amran et al., 2020). The process of burning raw materials for the production of clinker is the most important stage of the entire cement production process (Mikulˇci´c et al., 2013; Andrew, 2019). Cement kiln dust (CKD) is waste generated during the production of clinker. The dust collected in the dust collectors is partly reused in the production process and some is stored. The storage method is not preferred due to its operations negative environmental impact. If the dust contains alkalis, chlorides, sulphates, or heavy metals, they cannot be recycled. Generally cement plants strive to reduce the formation of dust. About 1.5 tons of raw materials are used to produce 1 ton of clinker. After the extraction, grinding, and homogenization of rawmaterials, the process of calcination of calcium carbonate takes place.
Hakim S. Abdelgader(1-2022)

Scientific Computing is an exciting and growing area that provides an important link between Computer Science and the Engineering and Physical Sciences. Today, computer graphics and geometric modeling are used routinely in science, engineering, business; and entertainment. In this thesis we develop object-oriented techniques and software for computing and visualizing implicitly defined manifolds ("surfaces") that arise a wide range of applications. The software differs from existing software for computing such manifolds in its software architecture. Furthermore, its algorithms are based on numerical continuation methods, rather than on subdivision techniques, which allows its practical application to the computation of two-dimensional manifolds in high-dimensional Euclidean spaces. The overall software provides a graphical user interface, algorithms for computing two-dimensional manifolds in higher-dimensional spaces, and graphics routines to visualize the manifolds.
Youssef Omran Gdura(6-2001)

Alkali-activated materials (AAMs) received broad recognition from numerous researchers worldwide and may have potential applications in modern construction. The combined use of AAM and steel fibers are superior to typical binder systems because the matrix and fibers exhibit superior bond strength. The results obtained by various authors have shown that good dispersion of the fibers ensures good interaction between the fibers and the AAM matrix. The tensile strength of FR-AAC is superior to that of Ordinary Portland cement (OPC)-based materials, with the addition of silica fume (SF) being particularly remarkable. However, the tensile strength of fiber-reinforced alkali-activated concrete (FR-AAC) decreases with increasing fiber length. The bond strength increases with the increasing grade of concrete, the roughness of interface, and the solution's strength activated by alkalis. Regardless of fiber type, AAC's modulus of elasticity is linearly correlated with compressive strength. Fibers can affect the modulus of concrete due to the stiffness of the fiber and the porosity of the composite. Poisson's ratio for AAC corresponded to the ASTM C469-14 standard (about 0.22) and decreased to about 0.15–0.21 with silica fume addition. There are limited resources for the experimental Poisson's ratio and it is only estimated using the predictive equations available. Therefore, it is necessary to conduct additional experimental studies to estimate Poisson's ratios for FR-AAC composites. Retention of 59% and 44% in flexural strength during exposure at 800 °C and 1050 °C was observed in the FR-AAC stainless steel composite, and the chopped alumina fibers achieved higher yield strength at these temperatures. For FA-based AAC mortars with 1% SF with a hooked end, activated with a solution of NaOH and sodium silicate, an increase in the number of bends increased the bond strength, load pull-out and maximum pull-out strength. Autogenous shrinkage and drying shrinkage increase with higher silicate content, while shrinkage decreases with higher NaOH concentration. Relatively little research has been completed on FR-AAC in terms of durability or different environmental conditions. In addition, trends of development research toward the broad understanding regarding the application possibilities of FR-AAC as appropriate concrete materials for developing robust and green concrete composites for modern construction were extensively reviewed.
Hakim S. Abdelgader (1-2022)

https://theses.gla.ac.uk/3406/Parallelization has moved in recent years into the mainstream compilers, and the demand for parallelizing tools that can do a better job of automatic parallelization is higher than ever. During the last decade considerable attention has been focused on developing programming tools that support both explicit and implicit parallelism to keep up with the power of the new multiple core technology. Yet the success to develop automatic parallelising compilers has been limited mainly due to the complexity of the analytic process required to exploit available parallelism and manage other parallelisation measures such as data partitioning, alignment and synchronization. This dissertation investigates developing a programming tool that automatically parallelises large data structures on a heterogeneous architecture and whether a high-level programming language compiler can use this tool to exploit implicit parallelism and make use of the performance potential of the modern multicore technology. The work involved the development of a fully automatic parallelisation tool, called VSM, that completely hides the underlying details of general purpose heterogeneous architectures. The VSM implementation provides direct and simple access for users to parallelise array operations on the Cell’s accelerators without the need for any annotations or process directives. This work also involved the extension of the Glasgow Vector Pascal compiler to work with the VSM implementation as a one compiler system. The developed compiler system, which is called VP-Cell, takes a single source code and parallelises array expressions automatically. Several experiments were conducted using Vector Pascal benchmarks to show the validity of the VSM approach. The VP-Cell system achieved significant runtime performance on one accelerator as compared to the master processor’s performance and near-linear speedups over code runs on the Cell’s accelerators. Though VSM was mainly designed for developing parallelising compilers it also showed a considerable performance by running C code over the Cell’s accelerators.
Youssef Omran Gdura(5-2012)

A review of previous array Pascals leads on to a description of the Glasgow Pascal compiler. The compiler is an ISO-Pascal superset with semantic extensions to translate data parallel statements to run on multiple SIMD cores.
Youssef Omran Gdurra, Paul Cockshott, Ciaran Mcreesh, Susanne Oehle(6-2015)