PhD Research, ongoing
Reshaping concrete: Empowering Development through Low-carbon structures
Less Economically Developed Countries (LEDCs) are struggling to meet the demand for affordable housing in their growing cities. There are several reasons for this, but a major constraint is the high cost of construction materials. In LEDCs, material costs can constitute over 80% of the total cost of residential construction. Nonetheless, their construction mimics the materially inefficient practices of the More Economically Developed Countries (MEDCs), which were developed to reduce labor over material costs.
This dissertation proposes a flexible methodology for the design and analysis of materially efficient concrete elements that can reduce the economic and environmental costs of urban construction. Designed for the constraints of LEDCs, structural elements are optimized to reduce the embodied carbon associated with the concrete and reinforcing steel while resisting the same loads of a standard building structure.
