Industrial Ceramics: From Waste to New Resources for Eco-Sustainable Building Materials

Today, the need to dispose of a huge amount of ceramic industrial waste represents an important problem for production plants. Contextually, it is increasingly difficult to retrieve new mineral resources for the realization of building materials. Reusing ceramic industrial waste as precursors for building blocks/binders, exploiting their aluminosilicate composition for an alkaline activation process, could solve the problem. This chemical process facilitates the consolidation of new binders/blocks without thermal treatments and with less CO2 emissions if compared with traditional cements/ceramics. The alkali-activated materials (AAMs) are today thought as the materials of the future, eco-sustainable and technically advanced. In this study, six different kind of industrial ceramic waste are compared in their chemical and mineralogical composition, together with their thermal behaviour, reactivity in an alkaline environment and surface area characteristics, with the aim of converting them from waste into new resources. Preliminary tests of AAM synthesis by using 80%–100% of ceramic waste as a precursor show promising results. Workability, porosity and mechanical strengths in particular are measured, showing as, notwithstanding the presence of carbonate components, consolidated materials are obtained, with similar results. The main factors which affect the characteristics of the synthetized AAMs are the precursors’ granulometry, curing temperature and the proportions of the activating solutions

A histomorphometric meta-analysis of sinus elevation with various grafting materials

Several grafting materials have been used in sinus augmentation procedures including autogenous bone, demineralized freeze-dried bone (DFDBA), hydroxyapatite, β-tricalcium phosphate (β-TCP), anorganic deproteinized bovine bone and combination of these and others. Up to now a subject of controversy in maxillofacial surgery and dentistry is, what is the most appropriate graft material for sinus floor augmentation

A petrographic gateway to the Barcellona Pozzo di Gotto (NE Sicily) built environment

We live immerse in a built environment made of buildings and infrastructures. Improving the built environment, also from an aesthetic point of view, has a positive feedback on the quality of life. In a stagnant economic scenario, the old cities of Italy face the challenge to revitalise their run-down areas with sensible and cost-effective conservation and restoration policies. This study focuses on the natural stones employed as building blocks for portal and window frames that characterise the urban landscape of Barcellona Pozzo di Gotto (NE Sicily). The use of basic petrographic observations allows to characterise the rock types employed between the XVI and XIX centuries for the construction of private buildings, to evaluate their decay degree and to propose a cost-effective restoration strategy based on the use of local stones, easy to found and, hopefully, with reasonable purchase and transportation costs

Electro-physical methods to stop rising damp. Assessment of the effectiveness in two case studies

Rising damp is a recurrent hazard to ancient buildings and its relevance is expected to increas