The Infrastructure Materials group is an integrated, multi-disciplinary team with expertise spanning engineering, geoscience and chemistry.
Based at Deakin University’s Burwood Campus, we focus on addressing one of the grand challenges of our time – anthropogenic climatic change – through innovative construction materials and infrastructure solutions that shape our interaction with the environment.
We achieve this through research into:
- Advanced construction materials with enhanced performance and added functionality
- Novel structural health monitoring technologies and predictive models
- Low embodied-carbon construction materials, including utilising waste resources within a circular economy
Our research capabilities
Our team brings together construction and natural materials, sophisticated analytical techniques, and computer modelling techniques. Key areas of capability include:
- Fabrication and characterisation of advanced cementitious composites incorporating natural and man made nano- and micro-additives, with enhanced strength, durability and multifunctionality. These materials enable higher early-strength, longer service life and greater durability construction materials, leading to cost savings, added value and environmental benefits.
- Advanced characterisation techniques, including Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy, X-ray diffraction, thermogravimetric analysis, x-ray and neutron scattering, scanning electron microscopy, X-ray computed microtomography.
- The use of supplementary cementitious materials and low CO² concrete formulations.
- Concrete service life condition assessment and prediction.
- Clay-based materials for cement replacement, corrosion protection barriers, landfill and other liner applications and industrial waste containment solutions.
We collaborate closely with complementary areas of expertise across Deakin and beyond, including leading experts in electrochemistry, surface chemistry and corrosion, fibre technologies, chemical synthesis, electronics, networks and machine learning.
Our research facilities
Our laboratory facilities include comprehensive fabrication and testing capabilities for cementitious materials, including:
- Fresh property testing including workability, setting time and rheology;
- Hardened property testing, such as mechanical testing, durability, cementitious phase identification and chemical composition and microstructural characterisation;
- Advanced properties testing, including chloride and carbonation ingress, diffusion, initial water uptake, electrical, thermal and analytical characterisation.
What makes us different
Our materials science and engineering research delivers practical, scalable solutions that reduce carbon emissions, add value and lower lifetime costs of infrastructure.
Our work includes the development of:
- Low-cement concretes with high levels of calcined clay materials, including materials derived from heat-treated and reclaimed PFAS-contaminated soils;
- Concretes incorporating carbon nanotubes with enhanced strength, durability and functionality;
- Self‑sensing cementitious materials with embedded miniature sensors for structural and durability health monitoring, as well as thermoelectric energy harvesting and energy‑storing construction materials for net‑zero‑energy buildings;
- Alternative mineral-based composites for infrastructure materials.
Through our deep technical understanding of these materials, and together with our Industry Partners, we actively translate research outcomes from the lab into real-world applications.
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