Publications related to Design and construction of a railway bridge in reinforced UHPFRC – World’s first UHPFRC bridge on a main railway line

Teaching Not To

Two design studios were successively taught in two schools of architecture: one at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) and the other at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL) in Lausanne, Switzerland, based on "A Global Morato ...

Taylor & Francis Inc2024

FLO:RE – A new floor system made of reused reinforced concrete and steel elements

Maléna Bastien Masse, Numa Joy Bertola, Célia Marine Küpfer, Corentin Jean Dominique Fivet

Carefully extracting reinforced concrete (RC) elements from soon-to-be demolished structures and reusing them as load-bearing components is an emerging circular low-carbon alternative to building new structures. As floor construction typically accounts for ...

IABSE2024

Rising from rubble - Leveraging existing construction tools for upcycling concrete waste into slender walls

Katrin Beyer, Maxence Grangeot, Corentin Jean Dominique Fivet, Qianqing Wang, Stefana Parascho

In this paper, we present a new method for upcycling concrete rubble waste into slender walls through the lightweight digital augmentation of mainstream construction machines. By using such method, the environmental impact of concrete construction and demo ...

Springer2024

Influence of model uncertainty and long term deformations in action effects calculation in reinforced concrete structures

Xhemsi Malja

Most codes of practice adopt a semi probabilistic design approach for the dimensioning and assessment of structures. Accordingly, structural safety is ensured by performing limit state verifications using design values determined with adequately calibrated ...

EPFL2024

Short-term behavior of glass fiber-polymer composite bending-active elastica beam under service load application

Thomas Keller, Landolf-Giosef-Anastasios Rhode-Barbarigos, Tara Habibi

Bending-active elastica beam is a structural configuration that is based on the elastic deformation of an initially straight beam. This deformation occurs when horizontal displacements are applied to a sliding support, causing the beam to bend into an arch ...

2024

Embodied Carbon Premium for Cantilevers

David Michael Volpe Ruggiero, Paola Costanza Miglietta

This study addresses the critical need for sustainable architectural designs within the context of climate change and the significant role the built environment plays in greenhouse gas emissions. The focus of this paper is on understanding the influence of ...

2024

An explorative method to support design decisions based on carbon constraints and daylight sufficiency needs

Nazanin Rezaei Oghazi

The global construction industry contributes to 37% of carbon emissions associated to both building operations and construction. To help achieve the net-zero targets set by 2050, it is mandated to achieve a 50% reduction in carbon emissions by 2030. As we ...

EPFL2024

Reuse of cut concrete slabs in new buildings for circular ultra-low-carbon floor designs

Numa Joy Bertola, Célia Marine Küpfer, Corentin Jean Dominique Fivet

The study explores an original idea that responds to the urgent need to reduce the detrimental environmental impacts of load-bearing floor construction in new buildings by reusing saw-cut reinforced concrete (RC) pieces salvaged from soon-to-be demolished ...

2024

A global framework for data-informed bridge examination

Eugen Brühwiler, Philippe Schiltz, Numa Joy Bertola

Examining the performance of an existing bridge requires information on several aspects, such as design choices, material properties, and ongoing degradation processes. It often happens that some critical information is not available. The traditional appro ...

2024

Low-tech methods for the reuse of reinforced concrete structural elements

Maléna Bastien Masse, Julie Rachel Devènes, Corentin Jean Dominique Fivet, Nicole Widmer

Most of existing buildings are made of concrete, new buildings are being built with it and others are demolished when still in good structural condition. This drives increased demands for raw materials, greenhouse gas emissions, and an accumulation of demo ...

2023

Energy dissipation in fiber-polymer composites adhesive joints under cyclic loading

Ghazaleh Eslami

Sustainable development has emerged as a paramount consideration in various fields of industry, including construction, to preserve the environment and its finite resources. Lightweight structures, such as fiber-polymer composite structures, address both s ...

EPFL2023

Experimental testing and structural analysis of composite tile – reinforced concrete domes

Savvas Saloustros

Conventional formworks for concrete curved shells either are expensive, complex and wasteful or have formal restrictions. Using tile vaults (also known as timbrel, Guastavino, thin-tile or Catalan vaults) as stay-in-place formwork for concrete shells could ...

2023

Appropriations and Uses of Travel Time

Ludy Juliana González Villamizar

Time has always been a central factor in understanding the challenges of daily mobility. For a long time, and still today, methods of economic evaluation of transport projects have monetized time savings so that they can be included in the cost–benefit ana ...

ISTE Wiley2023

From Automated Bootstrapping to Collaborative Editing: A Framework for 4D City Reconstruction

Didier Louis Dupertuis, Rémi Guillaume Petitpierre, Paul Robert Guhennec, Beatrice Vaienti

We propose a framework for the construction of 4D scientific models for cities of the past. It leverages both the use of computational methods for bootstrapping, and a collaborative interface for visualisation and edition. This permits to continuously enri ...

Zenodo2023

Reusability Assessment of Obsolete Reinforced Concrete Structural Components

Maléna Bastien Masse, Célia Marine Küpfer, Julie Rachel Devènes, Corentin Jean Dominique Fivet

The production of concrete, the most widely used construction material, detrimentally affects the environment. Obsolete reinforced concrete (RC) load-bearing structures, even when still in good condition, are today prematurely crushed and landfilled or rec ...

Springer2023

Design of New Low-Carbon Floor Systems by Reusing Cut Cast-in-Place Concrete Pieces

Numa Joy Bertola, Célia Marine Küpfer, Corentin Jean Dominique Fivet

As floors typically account for the largest share of a building embodied carbon footprint, new strategies to build low-carbon floors must be developed and implemented. Among these strategies, the reuse of existing components is a promising circular approac ...

Novus Press2023

Construction of sequencing libraries from a ribonucleic acid (rna) using tailing and ligation of cdna (tlc)

Didier Trono, Christina Ernst

The present invention provides a method for preparing a sequencing library from a ribonucleic acid (RNA) sample. ...

2023

Extractable Witness Encryption for the Homogeneous Linear Equations Problem

Serge Vaudenay, Bénédikt Minh Dang Tran

Witness encryption is a cryptographic primitive which encrypts a message under an instance of an NP language and decrypts the ciphertext using a witness associated with that instance. In the current state of the art, most of the witness encryption construc ...

Springer2023

Selection of informative monitoring techniques for bridge-performance evaluations

Eugen Brühwiler, Numa Joy Bertola

Decisions regarding the management of civil infrastructure are becoming more crucial as a large share of bridges is presently approaching what is often considered to be the end of their theoretical service duration. Evaluating existing structures using a d ...

Trinity College2023

Robotic Assembly of Integrally-Attached Timber Plate Structures: From Computational Design to Automated Construction

Nicolas Henry Pierre Louis Rogeau

The digitization of timber construction, the emergence of engineered wood products, and the urgent need to drastically reduce buildings' environmental impact have given a rebirth to wood as a construction material. On the one hand, increasing the use of ti ...

EPFL2023