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Princeton University researchers develop tougher cement inspired by shells

2024-06-13T14:48:00-04:00

Engineers at Princeton University have developed a new cement composite, inspired by the material found within certain shells, that is 17 times more crack-resistant than standard cement and 19 times more able to stretch and deform without breaking.

The research team was led by Reza Moini, an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering. In a recently published article in the journal Advanced Functional Materials, the team reported that creating alternating layers of tabulated cement paste and thin polymer can significantly increase the material’s durability.

Often looking towards biology for inspiration in their work on building materials, the researchers were drawn to a natural material called nacre, also known as mother of pearl. The material is produced by some molluscs as an inner shell layer, and it is also the material that pearls are made of. According to the researchers, nacre consists of a hard mineral called aragonite, which are glued together by a soft bio...

Port Authority of NY & NJ reaches milestone with new low-carbon concrete standards

2023-06-29T14:09:00-04:00

The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey announced earlier this month that it has reached a major milestone in one of the most ambitious low-carbon concrete programs of its kind among U.S. transportation agencies.

Originally introduced in September 2020, the Clean Construction Program aims to reduce embodied carbon, promote the circular economy, and reduce air pollution from construction across all of the Authority’s projects through a range of initiatives. They include the incorporation of LEED and Envision-equivalent standards, utilizing low-carbon concrete, collecting environmental data from contractors, facilitating pilot projects, waste matching for concrete, asphalt, and soil, and requiring low-emissions vehicles on site.

The agency took a major step forward by significantly strengthening its requirements to use sustainable concrete mixes in all future construction projects as part of its commitment to achieving net-zero emissions by 2050.

Related on Archinect: UN Secr...

UN Secretary-General calls for significant changes to the cement industry ahead of 2050

2023-06-15T19:38:00-04:00

In an address to the Global Cement and Concrete Association in Zurich on Tuesday, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres laid out his vision for changes to the industry he says are “fundamental to building a better world.”

Speaking to executives assembled in a “call to action,” Guterres asked for “concrete pledges from the concrete industry” before laying out his trifold ambits to ban coal-fired power in cement production, induce governments and industry to accelerate decarbonization efforts, and the furtherment of loftier emissions reduction targets and other plans in line with UN policy guidelines.

Seconding the Secretary's vision, the CEO of the Global Cement and Concrete Association, Thomas Guillot, added: “We applaud all the action our members are taking to implement carbon-cutting measures, and the latest data shows emissions are coming down. But many challenges remain, which we must overcome, if we are to achieve net zero, including enabling polices and regulations...

Baking soda may help concrete absorb carbon, MIT researchers find

2023-04-11T11:54:00-04:00

New research from MIT has found that adding sodium bicarbonate, otherwise known as baking soda, to concrete mixtures may make a significant dent in the material’s carbon footprint. The findings, published recently in the journal PNAS Nexus, also suggest that the addition of sodium bicarbonate may accelerate construction times through quicker concrete setting.

The research was led by MIT professors of civil and environmental engineering Admir Masic and Franz-Josef Ulm, MIT postdoc Damian Stefaniuk, doctoral student Marcin Hajduczek, and James Weaver from Harvard University’s Wyss Institute. With concrete production accounting for approximately 8 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions, and concrete being the world’s second most consumed material after water, the team sees innovation in the material’s environmental performance as being a key component to reducing global greenhouse gas emissions.

Researchers from Flinders University have developed bricks made from waste materials that don't require mortar to bond

2022-08-15T19:00:00-04:00

Researchers from Flinders University’s Chalker Research Lab have developed a more sustainable alternative to making bricks by using waste products.

The team used low-cost feedstocks to make lightweight but durable polymer building blocks, which can be bonded together with an adhesive-free chemical reaction. Their study tested the strength of these materials and explored ways they can be reinforced in construction.

Cover image of international chemistry and physics journal, "Macromolecular Chemistry and Physics" Sustainability Edition. Graphics by Animate Your Science. Image cover courtesy of Flinders University.

"In this study, we tested a new type of brick we can make from waste cooking oil, mixed with sulfur and dicyclopentadiene (DCPD)," says Justin Chalker, Professor of Chemistry at Flinders and the project leader. "Both sulfur and DCPD are byproducts of petroleum refining. These bricks bond together without mortar upon application of a trace amount of amine catalyst. All the s...

Researchers utilize shrimp shells to create stronger and more sustainable cement

2022-08-11T14:55:00-04:00

A team of Washington State University (WSU) and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory researchers has discovered a method to create stronger cement by putting nanoparticles from shrimp shells into cement paste. The innovation could lead to reduced seafood waste and lower carbon emissions from concrete production.

The findings were reported in the journal Cement and Concrete Composites. The research team created nanocrystals and nanofibers of chitin, a biopolymer widely present in nature, especially in marine invertebrates, insects, and fungi, from waste shrimp shells. When the chitin was added to cement paste, the resulting material was up to 40% stronger. The set time was also extended by more than an hour, which is a desired quality for long-distance transport and hot-weather concrete work.

“The concrete industry is under pressure to reduce its carbon emissions from the production of cement,” said Somayeh Nassiri, an associate professor at the University of California, Davis, who...

The world's largest 3D printed building made with real concrete is completed in Oman

2022-01-14T14:05:00-05:00

The German University of Technology in Oman (GUtech) along with Danish 3D printer producer COBOD and Mexican cement company Cemex has completed the largest 3D printed building in the world made with real concrete.

Located in the Omani capital of Muscat, the 2,100-square-foot structure was designed as a typical social housing unit in Oman. It includes three bedrooms, three bathrooms, a living room, kitchen, and a guest reception area. The house was printed in two stages. The first stage included the training of the Omani building crew while the materials recipe was being adjusted, which was followed by the five-day construction process.

Rather than using traditional dry mix mortars used in most other 3D printed structures, GUtech employed a D.fab solution developed by COBOC and CEMEX that consists of locally sourced cement, sand, and gravel — a mix that is, according to the development team, easier to deposit. The team tested the solution in Angola, resulting in the country’s first ...

The Global Cement and Concrete Association lays out roadmap to achieve net-zero concrete by 2050

2021-10-19T12:18:00-04:00

The Global Cement and Concrete Association (GCCA) announced that forty of the world’s leading cement and concrete manufacturers have come together to commit to cut carbon dioxide emissions by a quarter by 2030. This is a major statement in the association’s race to produce carbon-neutral concrete by 2050.

This move, according to the GCCA, marks the largest global commitment by an industry to reach net-zero. GCCA members account for 80% of the global cement industry volume outside of China, along with several large Chinese manufacturers. The association has published a detailed roadmap that lays out the path the industry will follow to reach the half-century goal. The GCCA notes that the roadmap actions between now and 2030 will prevent almost 5 billion tons of carbon from entering the atmosphere.

The plan includes identifying and implementing m...

Researchers from the University of Tokyo develop a new building material made of recycled concrete and carbon dioxide

2021-10-18T18:38:00-04:00

Researchers from the University of Tokyo’s Department of Architecture have developed a promising new kind of concrete that has the potential to reduce emissions from the construction industry.

Approximately 7% of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions come from the manufacture and use of cement, which is the main component of concrete. In addition, a large proportion of these emissions is due to the necessary use of calcium, which is primarily obtained by burning limestone. Professor Ippei Maruyama and Calcium Carbonate Circulation System for Construction (C4S) project manager Professor Takafumi Noguchi investigated a less carbon-intensive method of capturing calcium.

They subsequently found a way to take concrete waste and captured carbon dioxide and combine them in a process to create a usable form of concrete called calcium carbonate concrete. As noted in the research team’s report, Japan is estimated to have accumulated around 100 billion tons of concrete, with the annual amount ...

Waste car tires could make concrete stronger, say Rice University researchers

2021-07-27T14:50:00-04:00

Scientists at Rice University have published research which proposes repurposing waste tires in the production of concrete. By converting waste from rubber tires into graphene, the researchers believe the new composite can be used to strengthen concrete, and thus reduce the thickness of concrete needed in the construction of buildings.

“Concrete is the most produced material in the world, and simply making it produces as much as 9% of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions,” says Rice University chemist James Tour. “If we can use less concrete in our roads, buildings, and bridges, we can eliminate some of the emissions at the very start.”

Rice scientists optimized a process to turn rubber from discarded tires into turbostratic flash graphene. Courtesy of the Tour Research Group

Of the 800 million tires discarded every year, approximately 16% are discarded in landfills; the remaining majority being burned for fuel. As Tours argues, “reclaiming even a fraction of those as graphene wi...

Snøhetta and Saferock are developing net-zero concrete from waste materials

2021-05-28T10:39:00-04:00

Snøhetta has announced details of their partnership with Norwegian startup Saferock to develop net-zero concrete for the future of construction. To develop the product, the team has looked to exploit the vase residues and waste streams created by the world’s industrial processes. The result will be an alternative concrete mixture to widely used Portland-based concrete, and produced on site to reduce transport emissions.

Image: Bjørnar Øvrebø

The team’s process focuses on geopolymer concrete; a manufactured molecular material made of waste minerals from mining industries and power plants. The production of geopolymers has a CO2 footprint that is at least 70 % lower compared to the production of traditional Portland cement, turning the formerly environmentally hazardous waste into a productive construction material. In addition, geopolymers have several properties that are superior to Portland cement, such as higher temperature and chemical resistance, and significantly lower permeabil...

Cement-based batteries could turn concrete buildings into giant energy stores

2021-05-21T08:58:00-04:00

Researchers at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden have published unique research into the idea of rechargeable batteries made from cement. The team, led by Doctor Emma Zhang and Professor Luping Tang at the institution’s Department of Architecture and Civil Engineering, believes the development of this technology may yield a future where twenty-story concrete buildings can store energy as one giant battery.

The concept for Chalmers’ battery system begins with a cement-based mixture, to which small amounts of short carbon fibers are added to increase the material’s conductivity. A metal-coated carbon fiber mesh is then embedded within the mixture, with iron for the anode and nickel for the cathode, forming a high-strength battery system on an architectural or urban scale.

Schematic illustration of a design for the metal-coating battery. Image: Emma Zhang and Luping Tang

The research, published in the scientific journal Buildings, estimates that the new battery’s capacity ...

Recycled concrete performs as well as conventional concrete, new study finds

2020-12-09T13:04:00-05:00

Results of a new five-year study of recycled concrete show that it performs as well, and in several cases even better, than conventional concrete. Researchers conducted side-by-side comparisons of recycled and conventional concrete within two common applications -- a building foundation and a municipal sidewalk. They found that the recycled concrete had comparable strength and durability after five years of being in service.

Find the complete study Recycled aggregate concrete from large-scale production to sustainable field application by University of British Columbia Okanagan researchers here.

Efforts to reduce concrete carbon emissions grow

2020-08-13T15:03:00-04:00

In recent decades, architects, developers and policymakers seeking to lower the carbon footprint of buildings have focused on reducing energy use by improving the efficiency of lighting, heating and other systems. To lower emissions even further, they are looking beyond such operational matters to the carbon emitted in the production and transportation of the materials that make up the structures, or so-called embodied carbon.

Jane Margolies of The New York Times surveys advances in concrete decarbonization strategies, highlighting a set of concrete manufacturers that are using novel additives and different concrete recipes to save on carbon emissions.

Margolies takes a look at LafargeHolcim, Solidia Technologies, BioMason, Blue Planet, and CarbonCure Technologies, the latter of which is working to reduce concrete-related carbon emissions at the new 245,000-square-foot LinkedIn headquarters designed by STUDIOS Architecture in Mountain View, California by up to seven percent.

Carbon-sequestering cement absorbs power plant emissions as it hardens

2020-01-20T13:14:00-05:00

The key binding ingredient in concrete is cement, which has a massive carbon footprint. [...] So Sant and his team set to work on a greener approach that starts with a compound called portlandite instead of traditional Portland cement. The production of portlandite also releases CO2. But its unique chemistry allows it to absorb CO2 later in the process, when the concrete cures and hardens into precast blocks and other shapes.

The Los Angeles Times takes a look at the University of California, Los Angeles-based Carbon Upcycling team's efforts to bring CO2Concrete, a carbon-sequestering cement product, to the market. The team is vying for the Carbon XPRIZE, a $7.5 million prize competition aimed at monetizing carbon sequestration through the creation of new consumer products.

The innovative concrete mixture absorbs and stores carbon dioxide as it cures and requires less carbon to produce overall, offering a potential pathway toward low-emissions concrete products. According to the research team, if all the concrete in the world were made of CO2Concrete, the material could store 1 billion tons of carbon dioxide per year, or roughly 2.5% of the world's total carbon dioxide emissions.

The prize is sponsored by fossil fuel industry groups NRG and Cosia.

MIT researchers experiment with emission-free cement

2019-10-02T18:42:00-04:00

It’s well known that the production of cement—the world’s leading construction material—is a major source of greenhouse gas emissions, accounting for about 8 percent of all such releases...A team of researchers at MIT has come up with a new way of manufacturing the material that could eliminate these emissions altogether, and could even make some other useful products in the process.

The research team is exploring the "idea of using an electrochemical process to replace the current fossil-fuel-dependent system" that relies on coal-fired ovens to convert limestone, clay, and sand to Portland cement. Through the new process, the need to burn coal will be avoided and the emitted carbon dioxide will be captured and "used for applications such as oil recovery or even carbonated beverages and dry ice," MIT suggests.

How much pollution does cement really produce? Is there a cleaner solution?

2019-06-28T19:06:00-04:00

Cement is everywhere, but few notice the impact it has on the environment. A standard building material used everywhere, it is often confused with concrete. Cement is a key component in making concrete. By burning limestone at extremely high temperatures, this process turns the stone into a fine powder that's then mixed with clay and other minerals. This powder material, called clinker, is mixed together with other materials to create concrete. Despite its inexpensive and readily available supply, cement production is responsible for high levels of carbon dioxide emissions surpassing the emissions produced from trucks.

Huelva Cultura & Leisure Center in Andulusia is constructed with Larfarge Holcim's Agilia® ready-mix concrete. Image © LafargeHolcim

Thanks to Vanessa Dezem's Bloomberg piece, we learn why cement is so hazardous to the environment and what solutions have been made by manufacturers to help alleviate its hazardous output. The science behind cement and wh...

How cement could make us miss our climate goals

2018-06-29T14:04:00-04:00

According to the CDP report, the cement industry is the second-largest industrial emitter of carbon after the steel industry. And when accounting for its use in human-made structures, it is responsible for more than a third of the world’s carbon emissions. But unlike the transportation sector, in which a new type of fuel can dramatically decrease the sector’s pollutants, cement’s problem is, well, cemented in its formulation [...]

In his longform piece for The Outline, Mike Disabato explains why the cement industry shows little interest in earnestly reducing the tremendous environmental impact of its (nearly) indispensable product.

"No one in the cement industry has seriously engaged in the herculean task of enhancing the material’s molecular chemistry, nor have they looked to use [Franz-Josef] Ulm’s alternative at scale, according to the professor," writes Disabato. "Why introduce a new product if everyone is already buying your old one?"

The quest for low-carbon cement is beginning to look a little brighter

2017-12-08T18:39:00-05:00

Since 2008, Solidia Technologies [...] has been quietly developing a new cement-making process that produces up to 70% fewer CO2 emissions at a cost that DeCristofaro claims is on par with or better than conventional cement. Solidia, which was formed in a bid to commercialize ideas developed at Rutgers University in New Jersey, is not the first company to attempt to make environmentally friendly cement. But industry experts say it’s the most promising yet.

"Of course, the startup now needs to show that this lower-emission cement can be made into concrete that’s at least as good as others, and can be scaled up in a way that’s affordable," Quartz explains. "That’s what Solidia is working on right now."

New glow-in-the-dark cement could illuminate roads & structures

2016-05-11T13:46:00-04:00

A scientist in Mexico has created glowing cement that absorbs solar energy during the day and emits light after sun-down. Claiming the engineered cement can last a hundred years, he says it could make roads and structures glow in the dark, cutting the cost of street-lighting. The patent is the first for Mexico’s University of San Nicolas Hidalgo, says the researcher behind the invention, Dr. José Carlos Rubio, according to Investigación y Desarrollo.

Upcycling CO2 into a concrete competitor

2016-03-21T17:45:00-04:00

[UCLA's team of interdisciplinary researchers'] plan would be to create a closed-loop process: capturing carbon from power plant smokestacks and using it to create a new building material — CO2NCRETE — that would be fabricated using 3D printers. [...] “We can demonstrate a process where we take lime and combine it with carbon dioxide to produce a cement-like material ... We’re trying to develop a process solution, an integrated technology which goes right from CO2 to a finished product."

Related on Archinect:

China used more cement in 3 years than the U.S. did in the entire 20th century

2015-03-26T13:45:00-04:00

All of America’s cement consumption during the [20th] century adds up to around 4.4 gigatons (1 gigaton is roughly 1 billion metric tons). In comparison, China used around 6.4 gigatons of cement in the three years of 2011, 2012 and 2013 [...] The country is urbanizing at a historic rate, much faster than the U.S. did in the 20th Century. More than 20 million Chinese relocate to cities each year, which is more people than live in downtown New York City, Los Angeles and Chicago combined.