Overall Research Project Description Recycling and reuse of demolition waste is the key to making the construction industry more sustainable and decoupling resource consumption from economic growth. Globally, the construction industry is notoriously one of the largest raw material consumers with low resource recovery. Although around 90% of construction and demolition (C&D) waste is recyclable after proper processing and could be used to meet a building’s raw material demand, at least 35% of global C&D waste is sent to landfill sites. Considering the growth of economies and elevated concerns about raw material supply disruptions, there is a pressing need for sustainable harvesting of demolition waste, which comprises most C&D waste (more than 90%). As such, sustainable demolition operations are important from the environmental sustainability perspective.
Parallelly, the realm of building demolition operations, integral to rescue efforts after structural collapses, plays a pivotal role in saving lives. In this context, the swift and safe removal of rubble becomes paramount to maximizing survival rates.
Building demolition operations for both cases largely involve heavy machines (i.e., excavators). However, there has been a lack of study on the optimal operation of heavy machine for demolition tasks and the design of excavator buckets.
In this research project, UROP students will participate in experiments where they operate small-scale heavy equipment for different demolition tasks in order to look for more sustainable demolition operations and develop the optimal bucket design for rescue operations.