Urban engineering systems: some synthetic observations on materials

Abstract

Materials are a multi-suits science and an essential platform for practical engineering. It has multi-dimensional impacts to the society on energy, environment, medical science, transportation, communications, automobiles, aerospace, civil infrastructure, and so on and on. Rapid advances in the design and synthesis of new materials and associated technologies have prompted many major discoveries and innovations, pushing the quality of our living world to a higher level. The thrust of the paper is placed on civil engineering materials with building, maintaining, and operating the urban centre's civil infrastructure in mind. The discussion focuses to cement-based materials like concrete and composites which are expected to propel most problems faced on urban engineering systems to good solutions.