Circular concrete: validating new technologies in the lab and on-site

The growing importance of a circular economy also holds possibilities for concrete. Some of the principles of circularity, like the re-use of "waste" as secondary raw material and the optimisation of the design with regards to lifespan, environmental impact and re-use, can be applied. Several technological innovations in this domain are in an advanced stage of development. However, the transition from research to full commercial applications is held back, mostly due to the absence of documented experience and the lack of a technical framework (prescriptions). In order to accelerate the adoption of new technologies, the Belgian Building Research Institute (BBRI) started the project "Circular.Concrete". In this paper, the results are presented of validation tests regarding 1) smart crushing technology, 2) the carbonation of recycled aggregates, 3) concrete using only recycled aggregates and 4) the use of alternative binders and supplementary cementitious materials

Prototyping the recursive internet architecture: the IRATI project approach

In recent years, many new Internet architectures are being proposed to solve shortcomings in the current Internet. A lot of these new architectures merely extend the current TCP/IP architecture and hence do not solve the fundamental cause of these problems. The Recursive Internet Architecture (RINA) is a true new network architecture, developed from scratch, building on lessons learned in the past. RINA prototyping efforts have been ongoing since 2010, but a prototype on which a commercial RINA implementation can be built has not been developed yet. The goal of the IRATI research project is to develop and evaluate such a prototype in Linux/OS. This article focuses on the software design required to implement a network stack in Linux/OS. We motivate the placement of, and communication between, the different software components in either the kernel or user space. The first open source prototype of the IRATI implementation of RINA will be available in June 2014 for researchers, developers, and early adopters