NUST Team wins 2nd Position at international ACI Concrete Solution Competition

NUST students were successful in winning the 2nd Best Project title after successfully competing with 80x student teams representing top-ranked international universities from 53 different countries worldwide, at the American Concrete Institute  (ACI) Concrete Solution Competition Spring 2022 held in Orlando, Florida, USA on March 27-28, 2022.

The NUST Team presented their project “Advancements on Material and Structural Designing for Commercialisation of Engineered Cementitious Composites (ECC).”  The team members include Sikandar Ali Khokhar and Touqeer Ahmed of BE Civil Engineering 2k18, NUST Institute of Civil Engineering (NICE). The team’s faculty advisor and co-advisor are Dr Rao Arsalan Khushnood and Dr Fawad Ahmed Najam, respectively.

Their developed novel construction material is a special class of High-Performance Fiber Reinforced Cementitious Composites (HPFRCC) which can exhibit the tensile strain-hardening behaviour and tensile ductility contrary to the conventional types of concrete. The major issues limiting its commercial implementation are its complex material and structural design. Team NUST successfully addressed these issues. Machine Learning was incorporated to simplify the complex mix designing of the composite by developing a computer program that predicted the complete fracture behaviour of ECC. Alongside, the undiscovered structural level performance of ECC was simulated using sophisticated numerical models including nonlinear dynamic analysis against earthquake and wind excitations. The solution proposed by the NUST team was declared the 2nd most innovative, impactful, and sustainable solution.