Defensa de Tesis Doctoral de Laura González López

Título de la tesis: Development of high performance cement-based composites reinforced with nonwoven fabrics from sustainable raw materials and textile wastes


Programa: Ingeniería Textil y Papelera
Autor: Laura González López
Director/a: Mónica Ardanuy Raso
Co-director: Heura Ventura Casellas
Fecha y lugar de lectura: 1 de octubre a las 10h en el Seminario del INTEXTER

Resumen de la tesis:
Currently there is a growing concern about the sustainability of the construction sector due to its great contribution to climate change. Approximately one third of carbon dioxide emissions are produced by this sector, both during the construction and operational phases of buildings. Another environmental problem is the abundance of waste produced by industrial processes and products at the end of their useful life. In this sense, the use of more sustainable building materials and, in particular, the reduction of the necessary amount of cement is of great interest. This thesis focuses on developing and characterizing sustainable cement-based building materials reinforced with biodegradable nonwoven fabrics or produced from fibers recovered from textile wastes, mainly designed to be applied on thin panels for application on ventilated facades, pavements and reinforcement of masonry structures, as well as for the development of multifunctional sandwich panels for applications on facades or ceilings.
The first phase of the research focuses on the preparation and characterization of the nonwoven structures. On the one hand, nonwoven fabrics are prepared from biodegradable fibers such as flax fiber, and on the other hand, nonwoven fabrics are prepared with fibers from post-consumer textile waste, both of a technical nature such as aramid fibers, or from end-of-life textiles from fashion, such as cotton-polyester blends.
In a second phase, the preparation and characterization of the reinforced composite materials is carried out. The compounds are characterized mechanically (with the bending-deformation test), microstructurally (with observations from SEM and BSEM) and finally the thermal and fire resistance properties are evaluated. In a third and final phase of the research, comparisons are established between the different reinforcements, evaluating the reinforcement capacities that each of these textiles give to the cement matrix. From the results, it can be concluded that cementitious composite materials reinforced with the nonwoven fabrics developed in this thesis become a suitable material for its application as a construction material. Despite multiple works related to the recovery of textile waste and its applications in composites have been published, there is limited knowledge about the combination of raw materials that we propose in this project, as well as for its possible applications. In particular, there is also limited knowledge on cement-based composites in which the reinforcement is a nonwoven fabric prepared from biodegradable fibers or recovered from textile waste. In this sense, composites reinforced with textile waste represent a great advance in sustainability for the sector, in addition to offering resistance properties that are highly suitable for this type of construction applications. The results will help to develop new sustainable building materials with a high content of raw materials recovered from waste and that, applied in panels for ventilated facades, floors and roofs or for the reinforcement of masonry, will contribute to improve the energy efficiency of buildings already reduce emissions generated for the construction sector.