Ana Armada Bras: Sustainable Building Technology

Ana Armada Bras is a Professor of Bio-Materials for Infrastructure in the School of Civil Engineering and Built Environment, and she is the Deputy Director of the Built Environment and Sustainable Technologies (BEST) Research Institute. She is a Fellow of the Institution of Civil Engineers and a chartered civil engineer with over twenty years of professional experience. Her research lab develops insights on bio-based technologies for construction, working to enhance worldwide resilience, recovery, and adaptation from climate change.

Transforming waste into bio-based construction materials

Ana’s lab works on transforming waste products into new civil engineering resources. The team uses bio-based waste from agriculture and industry to make new construction resources with that have resilient, self-healing properties. To do this, the lab team merges expertise from civil engineering, material science, and microbiology. Together, they explore innovative, sustainable materials for Net Zero construction with an emphasis on self-healing bio-based solutions for use around the world.

In our modern world, waste can be a solution to global problems, including the demand for affordable housing. Housing depends on the demand for cost effective construction materials and the need to improve the building stock’s energy efficiency. Due to worldwide climate change, all the materials we use to construct housing will need to be resilient in different, place-specific ways. In Ana’s lab, work focuses on increasing long-term resilience by optimising the ways building materials respond to water.

Working globally

The team is running new projects around the world, including in the UK, Malaysia, Pakistan, Ghana, India, and across Europe. In a cross-European project, the team is leading on waste and innovative bio enhancement methods for resilient and critical infrastructures. They are working in Ischia (Italy) with heavy rain fall and rising sea levels, and in the South of France, with new aways to reuse agri-waste for urban resilience.

To understand these complex situations, the team address supply chain analysis for waste and Nature Based Solutions incorporation towards decarbonisation. This approach is vitally important. It can go beyond new technology to look at implementation and social economies.

Since 2017, Ana’s lab has worked to enhance social housing in India by developing precast building modular solutions that use bio-based concrete, repurposing agricultural waste to develop new concrete panels. By working with precast concrete supply companies, Ana can work to improve the process from the worker’s point of view. As she says, ‘it's about upskilling people, not only about the development of technology’. With the team’s academic partner in Maharashtra, located in Nagpur City, they have used these new panels to bring down the cost of precast housing too. This became crucial during the COVID-19 pandemic, leading the team to support the government's shift to modular housing for sanitation. Their innovative solution, costing 17,000 Rupees, significantly lowered the cost compared to commercial options (25,000 Rupees). This reduction, combined with a government subsidy of 13,000 Rupees, makes home toilets more accessible to families. The team is now collaborating with a local house-building NGO to further reduce costs and expand sanitation access.

Overcoming barriers

Each barrier Ana’s team overcome is an opportunity to see the problem with fresh perspective and find new ways to make a difference. Ana underlines that this is always a matter or risk and uncertainty. Managing a project means ‘we always have a lot of risks to solve. First, applying for funds, and we get more “no” than “yes”. That's life. Everyone falls, but we get up and we have passion and perseverance’. As a lab leader, Ana has made a culture where people share and learn from their mistakes. Research impact involves trial and error, and it takes time to collaborate with other organisations. The team keeps energy to just cross all these barriers, as well as ‘some patience and maybe some mindfulness exercises, time to time!’

Ana’s lab overcomes technological and project barriers by working together to see problems in their broadest contexts. When optimising modular construction of houses, the COVID-19 pandemic meant they had to shift the technology toward sanitation. As a result, the local governments in India are working with the team to discuss using these modular toilets in schools. Overcoming the technological barrier has taken Ana’s team to a new chance to make a difference to the world. They can lower the rate of young women quitting school because the buildings lack sanitation, and they have identified the scale of the impact this would make on schools retaining their female students.

Impact and career development

Ana plans research around a long-term approach and the opportunities that bio-based construction could open for her team. More and more, she has found that research impact projects give her the opportunity to develop researchers within her lab and empower their careers. She develops knowledge internally at the university and is always learning with people. Working together lets the team build new collaborations and identify different perspectives on the challenges they are facing.

The team draws on academic connections and networks around the world, collaborating with people and sharing contacts. These connections open doors for in-person visits and in-depth conversations about local and regional challenges. The key part is understanding what makes each challenge different in each location. In Malaysia, the team is working with partners on development targeting maritime infrastructure and port resilience. Back in Liverpool, the team has worked on a project funded by the British Council to identify training and research needs for the maritime sector. Treating each project as a place-based version of a shared challenge gives the team a framework for running new projects with a similar methodology.

Focusing on research impact empowers Ana to support the career development of researchers in her team. In one example, she was co-investigator on a European Commission-funded project with other LJMU staff. Working with LJMU colleagues, she co-designed a technology transfer program for mentoring postgraduate students to work with industry on a ten-month skills development placement. At the end of the program, all the students were hired into industry. An impact mindset bridges the gap between the University and industry, making researcher development relevant to the challenges people will face in industry. Ana also works to make sure her PhD students engage with top scientists through her international networks, bringing students into challenge-focused meetings to learn how teams develop knowledge to meet urgent needs. Sharing this approach enabled the lab to develop tools for LJMU Master’s and PhD students to excel in project management around the world.

The approach rings true for more established researchers too. One structural engineer in Ana’s lab works on developing optimised solutions for modular construction in circular economies. The researcher explores materials that could provide better sustainability and better durability. The work involves practical questions like sourcing the materials and putting them in place for local development. Together, they are working to support Liverpool City Council with a proposal to build 1,500 new houses in a Net Zero development. The researcher leads issues analysis on site, steering a major work package with the major contractors that will shape the development toward Net Zero.

What's next

As an interdisciplinary team working globally, the team uses the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals as a shared language. The Goals bridge between physical, natural, and human sciences. This connectivity is vital to how Ana sees the construction sector developing with a greater emphasis on wellbeing.

Ana is looking to frame research around support for policy discussions at the international level, which will maximise the benefits people experience from new bio-based construction. By working with policymakers in locations around the world, the team can go deeper into the local social needs that will spur the development of new technological solutions. Ana’s focus is on see impact in terms of social value creation, which is a new approach in the construction sector. The sector can be traditional, but people are paying more and more attention to the need for direct social benefit. Aligning the lab with this approach draws on the interdisciplinary strength of the research team and increases the meaningful contribution they make to people around them.

For Ana, the plan is to continue with her vision for a sustainable, climate-focused construction sector and to use her impact mindset to develop academic careers in her lab.

Ana spoke with Keith George.