Vegetation porous concrete is a novel material that integrates concrete technology with plant growth, offering excellent engineering applicability and environmental friendliness. This material is mainly utilized in eco-engineering projects such as riverbank protection, architectural greening, and slope protection along roads. This paper systematically reviews the current research progress of vegetation porous concrete by collecting and analyzing the relevant literature from both domestic and international sources. It covers several aspects including the material components of vegetation porous concrete, such as aggregates, cementitious materials, chemical admixtures, and plant species, as well as aspects like mix design, workability, porosity, pH value, mechanical strength, and vegetative performance. Furthermore, the application of vegetation porous concrete in riverbank protection, slope protection along highways, and urban architecture is discussed, along with a prospective outlook on future research directions for vegetation porous concrete.

Planting concrete, an eco-friendly concrete in which plants can grow directly, has been widely used in roof greening and the slopes of rivers. Porosity and compressive strength are important indicators for evaluating the properties of planting concrete. By preparing planting concrete with different aggregate gradations (10–30 mm, 20–40 mm) and water–cement ratios (0.25, 0.27, 0.29, 0.31, 0.33), the effect of aggregate gradation and water–cement ratio on the porosity and compressive strength of the planting concrete was analyzed, the intrinsic relationship between aggregate gradation and plane pore parameters was studied, the strength growth pattern and microscopic strengthening mechanism were studied, the relationship between porosity and compressive strength of the planting concrete were explored, and a tall fescue planting experiment was carried out to evaluate the plantation performance of the planting concrete. The results show that under the same conditions of water–cement ratio, the smaller the particle size of the aggregate, the smaller the porosity of the plane, and the denser the structure. The average diameter of the planting concrete shows an exponential relationship with the porosity of plane. The early growth of the compressive strength of the planting concrete is rapid; the compressive strength has a linear relationship at the ages of 7 days and 28 days. Compared to polynomial and logarithmic functions, the exponential function gives a better insight into the relationship between the porosity and compressive strength of the planting concrete. Tall fescue seeds germinate and grow well; height, cover, and leaf rootstock and element content of plants can be used as indicators to assess the performance of vegetated concrete planting.

The Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) method is a commonly used method for earth dam disease detection. However, the major challenge is that the obtained GPR image data of earth dam disease mainly relies on human judgment, especially in long-distance earth dam disease detection, which may lead to misjudgments and omissions. The You Only Look Once v5s (YOLOv5s) algorithm is innovatively employed for GPR image recognition to address the current challenge. The YOLOv5s neural network model has advantages over the traditional convolutional neural network in terms of object detection speed and accuracy. In this study, an earth dam disease detection model was established based on YOLOv5s. Raw images from actual earth dam disease detection and GPR forward simulation images were used as the initial dataset. Data augmentation techniques were applied to expand the original dataset. The LabelImg annotation tool was employed to classify and label earth dam disease, thereby creating an object detection dataset that includes earth dam disease features. The model was trained within this dataset. The results indicate that the total loss function of the model trained on the custom dataset initially decreases and then stabilizes, showing no signs of overfitting and demonstrating good generalizability. The earth dam disease detection model based on YOLOv5s achieved average precision rates of 96.0%, 95.5%, and 93.9% for voids, seepage, and loosening disease, respectively. It can be concluded that the earth dam disease detection model based on YOLOv5s may be an effective tool for intelligent GPR image recognition in identifying earth dam disease.

By testing the compressive strength, tensile strength, permeability coefficient, carbonization depth and relative dynamic elastic modulus, the influence of fly ash and polycarboxylic acid superplasticizer on the performance of recycled concrete was studied. The mechanism of action of fly ash and polycarboxylic acid superplasticizer on concrete properties was also analyzed by SEM. The results indicate that the compressive strength, tensile strength, permeability coefficient relative and dynamic elastic modulus of recycled concrete are increased by 7.1%, 8.3%, 81.0% and 16.7% respectively, the carbonization depth decreased by 34.4%, when the cementitious materials is replaced by 20% (by mass) of fly ash and 1.2% (by mass) of polycarboxylic acid superplasticizer. Therefore, fly ash and polycarboxylic acid superplasticizer can effectively promote the hydration of cement particles and improve the pore structure of concrete along with the bond between cement paste and recycled aggregate in the interface transition zone, which is suitable for the preparation of high performance recycled concrete.

The new Chinese national standard, Standard for the seismic design of hydraulic structures (GB51247-2018), has been published. Compared with the Specifications for the seismic design of hydraulic structures (SL203-1997), the standard design response spectrum curve was revised in the new national standard. In order to compare the seismic responses of an arch dam under excitation from the design response spectrum in the new and old standards, the dynamic calculation of a 240 m high arch dam is carried out by a three-dimensional finite element method. In the dynamic calculation, the B-differentiable equation is used to simulate the tension motion of arch dam contraction joints, and the multi-transmitting boundary method and the Westergaard added mass method are used to simulate the dam–infinite foundation and dam–reservoir interactions, respectively. The results show that the dynamic stress responses of the arch dam under excitation from the design response spectrum in the new standard are increased compared with those of the old standard. The seismic safety of an arch dam may decrease under excitation from the design response spectrum in the new standard. Thus, the seismic validation on built arch dams should be carried out by using the new standard when it is possible.

This paper studies the influence of different water-cement ratio configuration of recycled aggregate planted concrete on performance, the permeable property and drying shrinkage and the influence of different gelled material against compressive strength. At last, the plant growth performance of the planted concrete is analyzed through the whole process of screening, seeding and long-potential recording of the plants. It is found that the compressive strength of CA-R (recycled aggregate aluminate cement concrete) and L•SAC-R (recycled aggregate have low alkalinity) is higher, which is 7.6 MPa and 7.4MPa, respectively. Compared with the natural aggregate, the against compressive strength of the recycled aggregate is much smaller, and the difference of the experiment blocks with different age conditions is not large; It is better to set the porosity of the planted concrete between 22% and 35%: On the one hand, the total porosity of the recycled aggregate planted concrete is always slightly higher than that of the natural aggregate planted concrete, which is basically maintained at 31.7% and slightly higher than the design value; On the other hand, the total porosity of CA-R is larger than that of L•SAC-R and P•O-R (recycled aggregate ordinary Portland cement concrete), and compared with the total porosity, the variation of connected porosity is not obvious. In addition, the water permeation coefficient of 20-40mm single-stage concrete is between 15-19mm/s; And the dry shrinkage of aluminate recycled aggregate planted concrete is larger, there are different degrees of cracks on the surface and aggregate bonding. Among the three plants selected during the experiment, Festuca arundinacea and Alfalfa had good adaptability, but Bermuda grass had low adaptability.