Advances in Development and Characterization of Sustainable Structural Materials

Advances in Development and Characterization of Sustainable Structural Materials

Kemal Celik
Postdoctoral Scholar
Civil and Environmental Engineering Department
University of California, Berkeley

Building sector is responsible for 39% of the global energy consumption. It also accounts for 40% of the global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. The annual worldwide CO2 emission from cement manufacturing, for instance, is nearly 7% of the global emissions. In addition, 85% of energy is consumed when the buildings are in use through cooling, heating, and lighting. This emphasizes the need for investment on the sustainable and energy-efficient structural materials. In this talk, I will discuss the promise of utilizing high-volume of basaltic ash pozzolan or fly ash and pulverized limestone as a replacement of Portland cement clinker to produce self-consolidating concrete instead of using high dosage of a plasticizer or viscosity-modifying admixtures. In particular, I will present the results of multi-scale experimental studies performed to better understand the influence of the basaltic ash pozzolan, Class-F fly ash and limestone powder in the binary and ternary Portland cement blends, while following the physicochemical changes such as crystalline transition, hydration kinetics, and mechanical property. At the end, I will discuss the using cenospheres as micro-aggregates to introduce a controlled void system in cement composites to achieve low thermal conductivity but also maintain a high compressive strength. In this ongoing work, ultra-lightweight cement composites (ULCC) have been characterized with synchrotron-high-resolution micro-tomography along with the other techniques. The optimized ULCC incorporating with optical fiber has been scaled up to comprise translucent large panels to be validated in the state-of-the art beds at SinBerBEST facility to develop building efficiency and sustainability.