Abir Al-Tabbaa is Professor of Civil & Environmental Engineering and a Director of the newly established Centre for Doctoral Training in Future Infrastructure and Built Environment. She leads a large research group currently working on a range of topics including soil mix technology (SMT), ground improvement, land remediation and low carbon and self-healing materials. She led the largest research field trials in the UK using SMT at a contaminated site in Yorkshire as part of the £1.24M project SMiRT (Soil Mix Remediation Technology). Different SMT equipment, installation methodologies and binders were used to implement a number of ground improvement and remediation strategies followed by in-situ testing, monitoring and coring over the last 3 years. Current PhD students are focusing on the performance of different elements: Ziyad Abunada on the permeable reactive barriers and developing monitoring sensors; David O’Connor on the reactive low permeability walls and their self-healing capabilities; Tiffany Wang on the time performance of the stabilised/solidified ground and Zhengtao Shen on the impact of biochar on contamination and soil carbon.
Another area of current research is the development of low carbon and resilient materials for civil & environmental applications including cements and binders, sorbents and CO2 storage materials. A particular focus is on magnesium oxide (MgO) boosted with recent international funding of >£1M. Current PhD students include Fei Jin on characterisation and performance of MgO in clinkerless binder systems; Yuk Lau on the use of MgO as expansive additive for concrete shrinkage reduction; Adel Abdollahzadeh on novel cements for pervious concrete, Ahmed Abdalqader on MgO in alkali activated cements; Geane Freitas on MgO application in nuclear waste encapsulation, Funmi Alayaki on novel binders in the ground improvement of Niger Delta soils for road construction; Rui Hao on the sustainable production of MgO from reject brine and low grade magnesite and Mingzhi Wang on the numerical modelling of the carbonation of porous MgO systems.
Abir leads the geotechnical research in the recent nature-inspired multi-institutional £3.1M EPSRC funded project Materials for Life (M4L) developing self-healing cementitious materials for structural and geotechnical applications for enhanced durability and sustainability. Different scale self-healing components, namely microencapsulation, bacterial healing, shape memory polymers and vascular networks, will be embedded in cement, concrete, soil and soil-grout systems and will culminate in a field application in collaboration with industry. The researchers include Dr Antonis Kanellopoulos and PhD studies with particular focus: Chrysoula Litina on self-healing grout with microcapsules; Tanvir Qureshi on self-healing concrete with mineral additives; Petros Giannaros on the performance of self-healing concrete; Livia Souza on the production of self-healing microcapsules using microfluidics and Rami Alghamri on the self-healing with pelletisation of mineral admixtures.
Dr. Giovanna Biscontin
Dr Biscontin joined the Geotechnical Group at the University of Cambridge in 2013, after several years as an academic in the United States. Her work focuses on characterizing and modelling the response of soils, especially when subjected to cyclic loading, such as earthquakes. Her interests are also related to offshore deposits and soft marine clays in particular. She was awarded the CAREER Award from the US National Science Foundation in 2004 on “Characterizing and Modelling of Marine Clays for Submarine Slope Stability”. Her experimental research is related primarily to simple shear testing and especially the effects of anisotropy and multi-directional loading. With the help of her students, she developed a new three-dimensional simple shear apparatus, which is able to apply any load or displacement path in the horizontal plane. The device is also provided with a chamber, which allows saturation of specimens and measurement of excess pore pressures directly. The results from the experimental program are leading into constitutive and numerical modelling of soil response for the study of the seismic triggering of submarine landslides to evaluate the effect of gentle slopes on the response to shaking. More recently, she has extended her research into discrete element modelling as a way to gain insight on granular material response to multi-directional cyclic loading.
Thanks to the Centre for Smart Infrastructure and Construction at Cambridge, she now has access to large sets of monitoring data from excavations. Working in collaboration with Professor Kenichi Soga, she is using probabilistic methods to assess soil properties from measurements of deformations. She is currently also heading a project on design of foundations for offshore wind towers, sponsored by the National Science Foundation, in collaboration with Dr Charles Aubeny at Texas A & M University.
