A fine ash, made from pulverised volcanic rocks, can be added to traditional cement to improve its sustainability.
Who is involved?
MIT engineers working with scientists from the Kuwait Institute for Scientific Research and Kuwait University. The paper, Impact of Embodied Energy on materials/buildings with partial replacement of ordinary Portland Cement (OPC) by natural Pozzolanic Volcanic Ash, can be viewed here bit.ly/2EwZQwr
How is it novel?
By replacing a percentage of traditional cement materials with volcanic ash, researchers reduced the total energy required to make concrete. Building 26 concrete buildings, using cement with 50% volcanic ash, required 16% less energy than if traditional Portland cement was use, according to calculations.
The researchers also found that concrete mixed with a very fine ash was stronger than concrete made from just Portland cement. However, the process of pulverising volcanic ash to a very fine particle size requires energy. Therefore, if stronger concrete is made using this method, it becomes less sustainable in terms of energy use.
Oral Buyukozturk, a professor in MIT’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, commented, ‘You can customise this. If it is for a traffic block, for example, where you may not need as much strength as, say, for a high-rise building. So you could produce those things with much less energy. That is huge if you think of the amount of concrete that’s used over the world.’
