The Innovative Manufacturing and Construction Research Centre (IMCRC) will undertake a wide variety of work in the Manufacturing, Construction and product design areas. The work will be contained within 5 programmes:1. Transforming Organisations / Providing individuals, organisations, sectors and regions with the dynamic and innovative capability to thrive in a complex and uncertain future2. High Value Assets / Delivering tools, techniques and designs to maximise the through-life value of high capital cost, long life physical assets3. Healthy & Secure Future / Meeting the growing need for products & environments that promote health, safety and security4. Next Generation Technologies / The future materials, processes, production and information systems to deliver products to the customer5. Customised Products / The design and optimisation techniques to deliver customer specific products.Academics within the Loughborough IMCRC have an internationally leading track record in these areas and a history of strong collaborations to gear IMCRC capabilities with the complementary strengths of external groups.Innovative activities are increasingly distributed across the value chain. The impressive scope of the IMCRC helps us mirror this industrial reality, and enhances knowledge transfer. This advantage of the size and diversity of activities within the IMCRC compared with other smaller UK centres gives the Loughborough IMCRC a leading role in this technology and value chain integration area. Loughborough IMCRC as by far the biggest IMRC (in terms of number of academics, researchers and in funding) can take a more holistic approach and has the skills to generate, identify and integrate expertise from elsewhere as required. Therefore, a large proportion of the Centre funding (approximately 50%) will be allocated to Integration projects or Grand Challenges that cover a spectrum of expertise.The Centre covers a wide range of activities from Concept to Creation.The activities of the Centre will take place in collaboration with the world's best researchers in the UK and abroad. The academics within the Centre will be organised into 3 Research Units so that they can be co-ordinated effectively and can cooperate on Programmes.

The research applies philosophical ideas about expertise-in-context to improving practice in construction companies thus providing economic, social and cultural benefits. Construction is a rich environment displaying the use of expertise-in-context at a variety of levels in very intense and unique situations. The research will explore the therapeutic or diagnostic role of philosophy and its usefulness to practice, through the loosening of preconceptions and the exposure of unexamined assumptions and consequences based on a conception of knowledge as a process of activity (individual or social) rather than an abstract commodity that can be accumulated. \n\nThree construction companies, Mouchel, Pettifer Construction, and Rider Levett Bucknall, have agreed to be involved. The project will involve small group workshops with practitioners on site in these companies analysing the philosophical dilemmas in their work in order to sensitise them to the benefits of clear thinking in context so that they can revise their practice and company processes thus providing economic benefit. \n\nThere are three stages. The first stage will use a series of stories, embodying philosophical dilemmas, from the construction industry in order to develop language and concepts of expertise-in-practice with participants. For example, the concept of waste has a context dependent meaning so there may be confusion over whether buffer time between activities and adornment on a building should be so described. These skills will be used in the second stage involving small group discussion taking individual's actual experiences of practice and helping them to expose faulty and inadequate assumptions about knowledge and to identify organisational contradictions in structure and processes. The third stage will involve a number of participants taking this activity themselves into their organisations, and an exploration of how more rigorous thinking can be embedded in company structure and processes in a long term sustainable way.\n\nIndividuals involved will understand and value their skills more clearly recognising their expertise-in-context including diagnosing limitations to their knowledge and work context which they will be able to communicate to a wider public. This will provide immediate benefit to the individuals and company, however, also demonstrating a better image of the industry to attract new entrants. The activity will raise the cultural awareness of construction practitioners towards philosophy and the resultant publicity from the project will broadcast this generally across the industry. At the same time, the project will challenge philosophy to provide an articulation which can be appreciated in non academic environments. In the long term, this will enable staff to change company structures and processes so they are aligned with improvements in practice, and to assist colleagues in therapeutic and diagnostic thinking thereby creating a critical mass of staff for effective change. These processes facilitate sustainable evolutionary change from within.\n

SummarySlope failures related to pore-water dissipation, stress relaxation and desiccation cracks are major problems occurring in our ageing road network. Consequently, the remediation works necessary to correct these problems are known to cause congestion and delays that, in turn, cause financial loss. In order to decrease the recurrent time of maintenance work, Mouchel is running a pilot test using fibres mixed and compacted with natural soil to remediate a small failure occurred in an embankment south of the M25. Research in micro-reinforced soils is still in its infancy and, although laboratory research has shown that the addition of micro-reinforcement improves the strength properties of the composite material significantly, very little is known about their behaviour in situ, or of the effects of the field techniques currently in use to mix and compact the fibres, on their performance. This project, suported by Mouchel and the Highways Agency, is to study the effects of the field techniques in the performance of the composite material, originated from the mixture of clays with polymer tape fibres.The research will focus on the effects of compacting heavily overconsolidated peds (lumps) of clay on the fibre orientation and distribution within the embankment. A few samples of the in-situ compacted material, porvided by Mouchel, and samples prepared in the laboratory, will be dissected, and the results used as a basis to understand the orientation and distribution of fibres. Swelling and triaxial tests will be carried out on large diameter samples; the results will be used to understand and provide good quality data of the mechanical properties of the compacted reinforced and non-reinforced soil. The test results, together with the pilot study run by Mouchel, will provide the data to analyse the performance of the new material and their use in the maintenance of existing slopes along the highway network in UK. The outcome is expected to provide a better understanding of the effects of discrete fibre reinforcement on heavily overconsolidated clays and the effects of in-situ mixing and compaction techniques in the response of the composite soil. This will allow effective guidance in the construction and/or remediation of slope failures and widespread the use of this type of reinforcement as an effective way to reduce maintenance works on embankments. Improvement of soil characteristics using micro-reinforcement can also lead to a more sustainable way of using otherwise unsuitable soils instead of disposing of them

The proposal aims to develop a practical generalised model for analysing realistically dimensioned and loaded rectangular columns strengthened using FRPs. Strengthening circular concrete columns can be achieved by wrapping with FRP (fibre reinforced polymer). This confines the concrete, and can result in increases in load and strain capacity of over 100%. However, most columns are square or rectangular in cross section. Tests, mainly on small-scale rectangular columns, have shown a lower increase in strength, but still up to 50%. A number of simple empirical models have been developed to predict the increase in strength, based upon these small-scale tests. However, , due to size effect, the limited size of columns used in the tests provide little justification for using these models for the larger size rectangular columns found in practice. Thus, a fundamental investigation is required in order to provide a reliable model of behaviour. In order to establish such a general behavioural model there are three fundamental issues which are not well understood, nor limits defined, and therefore need addressing; size effect, aspect ratio and load eccentricity. Confinement of rectangular columns occurs by generating forces at the corners of the column through strain in the FRP, resulting in an effectively confined cruciform region. When the bond between the FRP and the face of the column breaks down, the FRP is no longer effectively anchored to the sides of the column and, ultimately, must strain from corner-to-corner resulting in lower confinement forces for large columns than for small columns with a small side length. For similar reasons, aspect ratio must also be considered. Additionally, as aspect ratio increases, the effectiveness of confinement is known to reduce. Finally, most columns are loaded eccentrically or have combined bending and axial loads. This results in uneven strain distribution across the section and, therefore unequal confining forces at each corner, resulting in a non-cruciform confined area. The behaviour, considering these three issues, will be ascertained via a series of instrumented and monitored tests on large-scale rectangular columns (for comparison with existing small scale test results), together with qualitative finite element modelling to establish the evolution of the shape of the effectively confined area. This information, together with a suitable bond-stress-slip and concrete failure models, will be used to develop an analytical model for strengthening of rectangular columns based upon the mechanics of the behaviour rather than by fitting experimental results.