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Register a new userInteractions of Fungi with Concrete: Significant Importance for Bio-Based Self-Healing Concrete
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The goal of this study is to explore a new self-healing concept in which fungi are used as a self-healing agent to promote calcium mineral precipitation to fill the cracks in concrete. An initial screening of different species of fungi has been conducted. Fungal growth medium was overlaid onto cured concrete plate. Mycelial discs were aseptically deposited at the plate center. The results showed that, due to the dissolving of Ca(OH)2 from concrete, the pH of the growth medium increased from its original value of 6.5 to 13.0. Despite the drastic pH increase, Trichoderma reesei (ATCC13631) spores germinated into hyphal mycelium and grew equally well with or without concrete. X-ray diffraction (XRD) and scanning electron microscope (SEM) confirmed that the crystals precipitated on the fungal hyphae were composed of calcite. These results indicate that T. reesei has great potential to be used in bio-based self-healing concrete for sustainable infrastructure.
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Concrete is susceptible to cracking owing to drying shrinkage, freeze-thaw cycles, delayed ettringite formation, reinforcement corrosion, creep and fatigue, etc. Since maintenance and inspection of concrete infrastructure require onerous labor and high costs, self-healing of harmful cracks without human interference or intervention could be of great attraction. The goal of this study is to explore a new self-healing approach in which fungi are used as a self-healing agent to promote calcium carbonate precipitation to fill the cracks in concrete structures. Recent research results in the field of geomycology have shown that many species of fungi could play an important role in promoting calcium carbonate mineralization, but their application in self-healing concrete has not been reported. Therefore, a screening of different species of fungi has been conducted in this study. Our results showed that, despite the drastic pH increase owing to the leaching of calcium hydroxide from concrete, Aspergillus nidulans (MAD1445), a pH regulatory mutant, could grow on concrete plates and promote calcium carbonate precipitation.
We address the problem of simultaneously learning a k-means clustering and deep feature representation from unlabelled data, which is of interest due to the potential of deep k-means to outperform traditional two-step feature extraction and shallow-clustering strategies. We achieve this by developing a gradient-estimator for the non-differentiable k-means objective via the Gumbel-Softmax reparameterisation trick. In contrast to previous attempts at deep clustering, our concrete k-means model can be optimised with respect to the canonical k-means objective and is easily trained end-to-end without resorting to alternating optimisation. We demonstrate the efficacy of our method on standard clustering benchmarks.
The lunar South pole likely contains significant amounts of water in the permanently shadowed craters there. Extracting this water for life support at a lunar base or to make rocket fuel would take large amounts of power, of order Gigawatts. A natural place to obtain this power are the Peaks of Eternal Light, that lie a few kilometers away on the crater rims and ridges above the permanently shadowed craters. The amount of solar power that could be captured depends on how tall a tower can be built to support the photovoltaic panels. The low gravity, lack of atmosphere, and quiet seismic environment of the Moon suggests that towers could be built much taller than on Earth. Here we look at the limits to building tall concrete towers on the Moon. We choose concrete as the capital cost of transporting large masses of iron or carbon fiber to the Moon is presently so expensive that profitable operation of a power plant is unlikely. Concrete instead can be manufactured in situ from the lunar regolith. We find that, with minimum wall thicknesses (20 cm), towers up to several kilometers tall are stable. The mass of concrete needed, however, grows rapidly with height, from $sim$ 760 mt at 1 km to $sim$ 4,100 mt at 2 km to $sim 10^5$ mt at 7 km and $sim 10^6$ mt at 17 km.
We present $mathcal{MEL}^{++}$ (M denotes Markov logic networks) an extension of the log-linear description logics $mathcal{EL}^{++}$-LL with concrete domains, nominals, and instances. We use Markov logic networks (MLNs) in order to find the most probable, classified and coherent $mathcal{EL}^{++}$ ontology from an $mathcal{MEL}^{++}$ knowledge base. In particular, we develop a novel way to deal with concrete domains (also known as datatypes) by extending MLNs cutting plane inference (CPI) algorithm.
We present the development of a specialized concrete for neutron shielding at neutron research facilities, based on the addition of hydrogen atoms in the form of polyethylene and also B$_{4}$C for enhancing the neutron capture properties of the concrete. We show information on the mechanical properties of the concrete and the neutronics, in particular its relevance to modern spallation neutron sources, such as the European Spallation Source (ESS), currently under construction in Lund, Sweden. The new concrete exhibits a 15% lower mass density, a compressible strength of 50% relative to a standard concrete and a significant increase in performance of shielding against MeV neutrons and lower energies. The concrete could find application at the ESS in for example common shielding components, individual beamline shielding and instrument caves. Initial neutronic tests of the concrete, carried out at Lund University, have also verified the performance in the MeV neutron energy range and the results are presented.
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