Waste glass is risky in our local environment to be dumped as garbage causing harmful problems in the reaction of alkali and silica. The concept was proposed to take advantage of waste glass crushing it into the powder for merging into concrete as a binding material for producing low-cost concrete with imparting effective thermal insulation property. Novelty in this investigation is to introduce an innovative and cheap electronic tool with precision and accuracy called thermocouple which was locally designed by an electronic engineer to calculate the rate of transfer of heat through glass powder (GLP) concrete cylinder. This tool was embedded in the fresh concrete connected with a digital thermometer which was later on tested in an oven after being hardened. Cement was somewhat replaced by glass powder (GLP) in casting cylinders. Many cylinders were cast with regular concrete and investigated for strengths, thermal insulation and other properties and compared with concrete using glass powder (GLP) as a partial interchange of cement in different proportions such as 5, 10, 15, 20, and 25%. The results were later compared to analyse the behaviour of GLP concrete where the slightly negative strength differences were noted compared to the controlled concrete. At the same time, the cost of concrete was lowered for use in the non-load carrying members as well as in the construction of temporary buildings in the rural areas. The important point here to mention is that GLP improved the thermal insulation property of the concrete in an effective, accurate and mostly importantly low-cost locally made tool providing a cool pleasant environment to the occupants especially in the counties where the temperature exceeds 40 • C in the summer.

Recently in various fields, numerous researches are going on for the assessment of material damage on the basis of crack initiation and propagation. Various methods are available in NDT for this purpose, among which analysis using released acoustic emission (AE) waves due to crack propagation is very effective due to its dynamic monitoring features. Various approaches are proposed for long time to make it an ideal method for accurate monitoring of crack behaviors in materials. In fragmentation theory there are some proportionality among the relations of AE event, AE energy, area and volume of cracks etc., which are calculated from the released AE waves from any dynamic crack. It has been found that the necessity of calculating the fractal dimension is important in verifying these relationships. This parameter is emphasized for determining the geometry of the irregularity in crack surface and crack volume. In this paper a novel approach based on image processing is proposed to find out the fractal dimension for analyzing the crack propagation characteristics. Finally, the proportionality relationships of AE parameters with crack propagation behavior in ferrite cast iron under fatigue loading are demonstrated experimentally.

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