Hessam AzariJafari will be a featured panelist at the Transatlantic Institute for Sustainable Trade’s roundtable on 1/31, “Creating a Market for Green Cement and Concrete on Both Sides of the Atlantic,” in Washington, D.C. The roundtable will discuss how regulatory frameworks can support the market uptake of cleaner cement and concrete technologies and accelerate decarbonization efforts.
This event is organized by the EU-U.S. Trade and Technology Dialogue.
Danial Amini and Johannes Kalliauer describe an accessible and inexpensive flood modeling approach accounting for city texture.
Click here to read more.
In their new op-ed in The Hill, Randolph Kirchain and Hessam AzariJafari explain why road improvements enhancing pavement stiffness and smoothness are essential to improve the efficiency and environmental performance of all vehicles. The majority of vehicles on the road are projected to be powered by traditional engines up through 2050, making it essential for states and municipalities to use this lever to cut emissions. The authors propose that the Federal Highway Administration should expand their current carbon performance measure to include emissions associated with road performance.
Franz-Josef Ulm sat on a panel with Pete Buttigieg at the Transportation Research Board’s 2024 meeting yesterday. The panel was part of a U.S. Department of Transportation-led workshop titled “New Materials for Infrastructure: Reinventing the Roadway, Runway, and Railway.”
In this report, Randolph Kirchain, Frank Field, Beth Unger, and Liz Moore summarize the MIT CSHub’s work to date to understand and mitigate the concrete delivery professional (CDP) shortage. Many thanks to the Concrete Advancement Foundation for sponsoring this special project.
Happy Holidays from the MIT CSHub! A hearty thank you to everyone in our community for your support. From our researchers to our industry partners, everyone in and around the Hub has helped progress our vision of realizing a carbon neutral industry, enabling more sustainable infrastructure with finite resources, and creating more resilient communities. We wish you and yours a great holiday season. 2024 is shaping up to be an exciting year at the Hub, and we hope you will join us for the ride.
Two articles of ours were among MIT News’ most popular of 2023.
Why was Roman concrete so durable? Researchers discovered ancient concrete-manufacturing strategies that gave Roman concrete its famed durability. The work may hold the key to designing concrete that lasts for millennia.
A supercapacitor made from ancient materials: A new kind of supercapacitor could provide cheap and scalable energy storage for renewable energy sources. The device is made from ancient, ubiquitous materials including cement, carbon black, and water.
During this webinar, we show the use of surrogate modeling to enable pavement design optimization and refine long-term performance forecasting. The presentation also includes the role of enhanced pavement design and strategic maintenance and rehabilitation (M&R) planning in mitigating greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions throughout the pavement’s life cycle. Additionally, the webinar will address the practicality of constraining structured data specification to simplify a meaningful comparison of different pavement design options.
From a successful PhD defense to a new research brief, it has been an eventful month at the Hub. Some highlights from our December Newsletter:
Join Randolph Kirchain, Hessam AzariJafari, and Haoran Li, PhD as they discuss findings from our recently-developed streamlined life cycle assessment tool for pavements during a public webinar at 11am. RSVP link: https://lnkd.in/gsY6uw6C
A new research brief by Johannes Kalliauer and Danial Amini explores a computationally inexpensive method to model urban flooding on different scales.
A warm congratulations to Ipek Bensu Manav, who successfully defended her doctoral thesis on Nov. 27.
