CIES Associate Professor Hamid Valipour has long been a man on a mission – a mission to reduce the construction industry’s currently massive carbon footprint.

His work over the last ten years has focused on the development of innovative structural systems with lower energy and carbon footprints, which are easier to fabricate, assemble and dismantle than those of current practice.

Valipour’s vision is for the widespread uptake of hybrid structural systems that fully exploit the advantages of steel, concrete and engineered timber to reduce the self-weight, cost and negative environmental impact of current structures, and also enhance opportunities for deconstruction, reusing and upgrading of structures.

And now it seems Dr Valipour’s time might have come – after he won not one but TWO highly sought after and extremely competitive Australian Research Council Discovery Projects grants at the end of 2021.

One Discovery Project (DP) is on the topic of torsion in innovative timber composite floors, which have the potential to significantly improve the speed and efficiency and reduce the carbon and energy footprint of the construction industry.  The other DP is looking at best-practice connections for hybrid steel-timber-concrete structures. 

Hamid is Chief Investigator on both projects working with eminent CIES colleagues, Professor Mark Bradford for the topic of timber composite floors, and Professor Stephen Foster, Dean of UNSW Engineering, on connections. Both are regarded as global leaders in their respective fields – steel and concrete.  Add Valipour’s expertise and research passion – timber!

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Source and image credit: UNSW