{"id":34992,"date":"2016-05-24T07:41:17","date_gmt":"2016-05-24T05:41:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/?p=34992"},"modified":"2016-05-19T13:33:15","modified_gmt":"2016-05-19T11:33:15","slug":"coffee-more-than-a-just-drink-for-swinburne-engineers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/coffee-more-than-a-just-drink-for-swinburne-engineers\/","title":{"rendered":"Coffee more than a just drink for Swinburne engineers"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Professor Arul Arulrajah, who leads the geotechnical group in the Centre for Sustainable Infrastructure, has been investigating the use of recycled materials, such as crushed brick or glass and concrete, for use in road construction.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>He is also an avid coffee drinker. \u201cI see the baristas throwing away the used coffee grounds and I think, \u2018why not look at this as an engineering material?\u2019\u201d he says.<\/p>\n<p>Professor Arulrajah and PhD candidate Teck-Ang Kua collected used coffee grounds from caf\u00e9s surrounding Swinburne\u2019s Hawthorn campus. They dried them in a 50\u00b0C oven for five days, then sieved the grounds to filter out lumps.<\/p>\n<p>They then mixed seven parts coffee grounds with three parts of slag \u2013 a waste product from steel manufacturing. A liquid alkaline solution was added to bind everything together.<\/p>\n<p>The mixture was compressed into cylindrical blocks that proved strong enough to use as the subgrade material that sits under a road surface.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cOn average the caf\u00e9s we collect from dispose of about 150 kg of coffee grounds per week,&#8221; says Professor Arulrajah.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe estimate that the coffee grounds from Melbourne\u2019s caf\u00e9s could be used to build five kilometres of road per year. This would reduce landfill and the demand for virgin quarry materials.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>This research is a collaboration with Suranaree University of Technology, Thailand; Southeast University, Nanjing, China; and Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China. It has been published in Construction and Building Materials.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Professor Arul Arulrajah, who leads the geotechnical group in the Centre for Sustainable Infrastructure, has been investigating the use of recycled materials, such as crushed brick or glass and concrete, for use in road construction. He is also an avid coffee drinker. \u201cI see the baristas throwing away the used coffee grounds and I think, [&#8230;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":58,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","nova_meta_subtitle":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5572],"tags":[12212,5817,5528],"supplier":[4486,8116],"class_list":["post-34992","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bio-based","tag-coffee","tag-research","tag-sustainability","supplier-suranaree-university-of-technology","supplier-swinburne-university-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34992","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/58"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34992"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34992\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34992"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34992"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34992"},{"taxonomy":"supplier","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/supplier?post=34992"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}