Epoxy clay nanocomposites have been proven to have improved mechanical, thermal and physical properties over pristine matrix. Thus, the fields of application of epoxy–clay nanocomposites along with their hybrid glass/carbon fibre reinforced composites have grown tremendously during the last few decades. The present review paper covers the research work performed on epoxy clay nanocomposites. It includes the influence of the processing techniques and parameters on the morphology of the nanocomposite, the methods of characterization and the effects of adding nanoclay on the mechanical and physical properties of composite. The improvements in the liquid barrier properties brought about by the addition of nanoclay platelets to epoxy resin are discussed. The variation of physical and mechanical properties with nanoclay type and content are reviewed along with the effects of moisture uptake on these properties. The advances in the development, characterization and applications of hybrid glass fibre reinforced epoxy–clay nanocomposites are discussed. Findings of the research work on the influence of nanoclay addition and exposure to water laden atmospheres on the behaviour of the hybrid glass fibre epoxy–nanoclay composites are presented. Finally, the potential health and environmental issues related to nanomaterials and their hybrid composites are reviewed.

The building sector is one of the crucial stakeholders in the global energy and environmental scenario. Life cycle assessment (LCA) is a tool widely used to evaluate the environmental performance of buildings, materials and activities. Saudi Arabia has a rapidly growing construction sector with over $1 Trillion of ongoing projects. The housing sector, annually needing over 2.32 million new residential units in coming years, is yet to entertain environmental performance of buildings in its list of priorities. The present work undertakes a LCA study of a three-bedroom modern villa located in Dhahran. Providing the structural details of the villa, an account of the 18 main construction materials in terms of quantity and application has been produced. Embodied energy of these materials has been estimated adopting ‘cradle-to-gate’ approach. Environmental impacts of the materials have been modeled with the help of SimaPro software. The results suggest that concrete accounts for more than 43% of the total embodied energy of the house and is also the predominant material in terms of the overall environmental impacts. Steel is the second most prominent material both in terms of quantity and embodied energy.

The mechanical response of metallic materials is controlled by multiple deformation mechanisms that coexist across scales. Dislocation glide is one such process that occurs after bypassing obstacles. In macroscopic well-annealed single-phase metals, weak obstacles such as point defects, solid solution strengthening atoms, short-range dislocation interactions, and grain boundaries control dislocation glide by pinning the scarce dislocation density. This work investigates the dislocation glide energy barrier in face-centered cubic (FCC) metallic materials by considering a crystal plasticity model that computes the yield strength as a function of temperature. The dislocation glide energy barrier is parameterized by three different formulations that depend on two parameters. A Monte Carlo analysis randomly determines all other coefficients within uncertainty bounds identified from the literature, followed by fitting the two energy barrier parameters to experimental data. We consider ten FCC materials to demonstrate that the methodology characterizes robustly the dislocation glide energy barrier used by crystal plasticity models. Furthermore, we discovered a correlation between the glide barrier and the stacking fault energy that can be used as a basis to infer the glide activation energy.Graphical abstract