 Today, our College of Science and Engineering seminar. It's one of our own. So, Rosemar Dilesia is a graduate from our program in 2012 in IESM. It was an interesting timing then. It was right around the same time that the Spanish company had won the tender on a lot of the pavement design and construction of the North-South Highway. It's a project that's in the news a lot. It's been underway the last few years. I happened to meet with a couple of the folks who worked for the company. One of whom was a professor in a university in Spain. And when they found out that I work at AUA and we have an engineering program, they were curious if we had any pavement experts. I said, well, maybe not exactly pavement, but in industrial engineering, our students look at such topics as optimization and modeling and linear programming and statistical analyses and different kinds of related fields that are universal in terms of engineering analysis. Well, one thing went to another and upon Rouse speaking, maybe he can talk about that, upon his graduation from AUA, he was asked by the folks in the company to apply for the PhD program. Well, one thing went to another and he spent the last four or five years in Barcelona at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia studying concrete pavement design optimization. So a very interesting topic, a very relevant topic for us here in Armenia and one that demonstrates, I think, some of the synergies between some of the topics we study here in the classroom and some of our reality outside. So on vacation now in Armenia and we don't want Rouse to enjoy his vacation without putting him on stage to share with us some of his latest degrees. So thanks for taking the time and thanks for joining us again. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Actually, where I'm working is the covers made of spin-off in company and they are doing research really not only in the academic areas, also they get some projects from companies, from government. So my scholarship is drained from the foundation from government and the university. So let's start. This white wheel and the problem regarding the rigid pavement is a little bit complicated because the lower cost of light is the best environment difference to recycling and also to reduce the anti-alarm effect due to light color and also more reflective of light so it's reducing the energy for lighting the streets or the highways. And asphalt is not resistant to high temperature conditions to make a positive changes and also due to high friction there is a higher fuel consumption and also it is the cost of the asphalt is instable due to fast-changing international oil prices. Here you can see some different ways of modern construction of rigid pavements in our case we will discuss the most common joint concrete pavement the first one you can see here with the joints from 6 meters long. What are the motivations that we started this project? When the concrete is radiating it is in a subjected to moisture-intensive stresses then direct rating in early age so on this area and there we are cracking resulting from these mechanics we play a writer role in short term and long term the course of this pavement and to understand better what cracking is probably most of you have been in the laboratory here at AVA at MB007 if I'm not mistaken the number of the room so there you can see some pavement you can see some cracks joints and you could see some cracks maybe in this case it will not affect the life of this pavement but in reality it's supposed to not in vehicle loads or if it is the concrete where people are crossing in the streets it might affect the life of the concrete and this crack the result of the late cutting and this crack maybe the result of the longer joint spacing that it was supposed to be done so it was not done properly or maybe they used wrong strength class of concrete for this kind of pavement and also these factors are bringing the prediction that we have and in particular the massive ones are of high importance the massive ones maybe dams maybe arcs, maybe concrete pavements and another point that we started to develop this model among other developed countries, European countries the concrete pavements are less common in Spain if you compare with Germany or Netherlands or Belgium and there are not a lot of tools available for concrete pavement design or they have a lot of limitations and most of them there are many cases which are just for in particular problems and they are not for general solutions and the last point and maybe the most important is the largest concrete pavement is under construction in Armenia by when they started by Spanish I think you can see I think everyone knows about this construction project and in construction when you do the cost analysis you can see if you can control the cost or you make a proper design before starting the construction you avoid high cost but be prepared to do the proper design you will have a lot of additional cost to change the design to restore and our model for example I brought just one example of how our model can be beneficial in terms of money if we achieve a design of thickness of pavement that is like 3 cm less than it was supposed by model cost or experience you will learn from $60 to $80 is the approximate cost of one cubic meter of concrete in construction site of Armenia so if we reduce the 3 cm of the thickness we might achieve for 100 km we might save $2.5 million just for concrete so this is the variable cost keeping other costs no variable but also there is another factor that we are designing the joint and joint spacing if you do it wrong the concrete may pale and as ever cracking might bring the failure of the structure and then we have to reconstruct all the pavement so these costs are uncut because it is much more complicated to take into account or we could get numbers from some company so what are the objectives and goals for my thesis so you can see that when the concrete when the cement is mixed with the water there are chemical reactions going on and the heat is generated and there are many factors and parameters which are literally the heat and you can see some of you know the basics of thermodynamics should be familiar even from physics what is the conductivity of the heat capacity or the diffusivity and the main parameter what we call the hurt of this scale is the degree of hydration which is going through time starting when the cement and the water get mixed which ratio degree of hydration degree and you can see that there are many parameters input parameters all the parameters mentioned here may change during the hydration when they may be affected by temperature and also they might affect the temperature or the humidity or the other mechanical or thermal parameters of the material such as modulus or density strength or to integrate all the parameters of concrete pavement in a single vertical tool for the optimized design of these elements as these models are not usually linear it is impossible to just add an update and to get some solution therefore there should be somehow covered so this we need some high level of knowledge for engineers to do programming or construct multiple models and do calculations and if they use the mechanical tools in particular fundamental finding the first method they should now have a high knowledge of programming to enter these kind of problems and in existing models are just for us