Award of MOE AcRF Tier 1 - Associate Professor Zhao Ou

Congratulation to Associate Professor Zhao Ou on the award of MOE AcRF Tier 1 (Call 2/2024) for his project - Novel and Sustainable Carbon Fibre Reinforced Polymer-Confined Recycled Aggregate Concrete Seawalls (CFRP-confined RAC seawalls) for Coastal Protection

About Ministry of Education (MOE) Academic Research Fund (AcRF)

The AcRF supports research in the Autonomous Universities that has academic significance and a good potential for creating new knowledge that will benefit the larger academic community. The research outcomes should advance high-quality research of international excellence that challenges current understanding or provides pathways to new frontiers. It supports research that serves as a foundation for discoveries that have or will have direct impact on the economy and society. AcRF contributes towards MOE’s mission of training postgraduate research manpower to support the national R&D activities by funding research scholarships.

 

Project Write-up

 

 

Singapore has been actively promoting the development of innovative and sustainable engineering solutions for coastal protection against sea level rise, while also emphasising the adoption of 3Rs (Reduce, Reuse and Recycle) of construction and demolition wastes. In this project, a novel and sustainable structural system – carbon fibre reinforced polymer-confined recycled aggregate concrete seawall (CFRP-confined RAC seawall) is proposed, with the goals of boosting the use of recycled aggregates from construction and demolition wastes as well as protecting coastlines against sea level rise.

The proposed CFRP-confined RAC seawall consists of an inner RAC core and outer CFRP layers, which are characterised by excellent material strength and durability and can provide superior and continuing lateral confinements to the inner RAC in the harsh marine environment, with sufficient capacities against seawater-induced lateral pressure and corrosion.

The present project aims at investigating the structural behaviour of this newly proposed CFRP-confined RAC seawall system subjected to combined actions of lateral pressure and wet-dry cycles of seawater based on experiments, quantifying the effects of various key material and geometric parameters as well as the load-carrying capacity, and developing efficient approaches for its design through regression analyses and machine learning.