PhD Student Award 2014

Innovation in Concrete Structures
and Cementitious Materials

2014

Foreword

Favoring the education of Engineers to improve their design skills and their capability for innovation in the construction processes is certainly one of the raisons d’être of ACI, this being also a smart way to enhance the mutual understanding and the cooperation between the Building Industry and the Professions, and Higher Education represented – not only but mostly – by graduate and doctoral schools.

Unfortunately, there is in some spheres – and particularly in certain countries – the belief that doctoral studies and practice are two parallel worlds, with unavoidable but mostly episodical connections. Such a belief is only partially justified, as high-level theoretical, numerical and experimental methodologies fly necessarily high because of the complexity of many engineering problems. At the same time, paraphrasing Einstein, models should be simple but not too simple!

Favoring the mutual understanding among the Building Industry, the Professions and Ph Doctors was the driving force behind this initiative. Thanks to the financial support of Federbeton (Italian Association of Cement Producers) the best three PhD dissertations, defended in the period 2012-2014, received a prize of 1000 euros. The award ceremony took place during the conference Innovazione per il rilancio del settore dei materiali cementizi e delle costruzioni in c.a./c.a.p.: ricerca scientifica, sviluppo industriale, pratica progettuale e costruttiva (SAIE 2014, in Bologna). Read here the complete program.

Awards Designation

The Scientific Committee instituted for the designation of the ACI Italy Chapter – Federbeton Award “Innovation in Concrete Structures and Materials Cementitious” – addressed to the best doctoral thesis defended from 2012 to 2014 – after a long and careful evaluation of the received abstract, announced the names of the three winners and of the five special mentions. See here the comunication.

Winners

Antonio Caggiano“Meso-Mechanical Analysis of Steel Fiber-Reinforced Cementitious Composites”
Antonella D’Alessandro“The Use of Nanotechnologies for the production of Strain-Sensitive Cementitious materials”
Francesco Lo Monte“Reinforced Concrete in Fire: from Materials Behaviour to Spalling Sensitivity and Structural Modelling”