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.
A warm congratulations to Ipek Bensu Manav for her successful PhD defense! Dr. Manav presented on “Assessing the Intersectional Risks Associated with the Full Life Cycle of the U.S. Housing Stock” before her doctoral committee last week.
We appreciate your hard work and look forward to seeing where your research takes you!
From presentations at ACI to our Fall Advisory Meeting, it has been an eventful month at the Hub! Some major updates:
Thank you to all who attended the November 1+2 Fall Advisory Meeting. We had great discussions and presentations on all things concrete, not to mention an excellent poster session inviting industry to engage directly with the researchers making our work possible.
We led eight presentations across diverse topic areas at ACI. Click the link below for more details.
We hosted academic and industry visitors from organizations like the Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León and Cemex México at MIT — thank you for the visit!
In this research brief by Johannes Kalliauer and Danial Amini, we explore a computationally inexpensive method to model urban flooding on different scales.
Thank you to everyone who attended our presentations at ACI. We had eight presentations covering diverse topics. We are looking forward to the next Concrete Convention in New Orleans! Please find the list of presentations below:
i. Randolph Kirchain, “Incorporating Climate Vulnerability into the Study of the Embodied Carbon of Buildings”
ii. Marcin Hajduczek, “Chemically induced pre-sure carbonation: A novel system for carbon sequestration in cementitious materials”
iii. Ipek Bensu Manav, “Exploring Opportunities for Building Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) to Inform Cement Scope 1-3 Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Reporting” (Poster)
iv. Ariel Attias, “Statistical Physics for Quasi-Brittle Fracture”
v. Elizabeth Moore and Beth Unger, Ph.D, “Transforming the Role of the Concrete Delivery Professional: A Study on Innovative Solutions for the Ready-Mix Concrete Industry”
vi. Haoran Li, Ph.D, “Development of a streamlined framework for probabilistic and comparative life cycle assessment (LCA) of concrete pavements”
vii. Damian Stefaniuk, “Carbon-cement supercapacitors: A disruptive technology for renewable energy storage”
viii. Hessam AzariJafari, “Concrete Material Transparency: How Buy Clean Initiatives are Transforming Project Requirements”
“I think to make real progress in sustainability, materials scientists need to think in interdisciplinary, systems-level ways, but at a deep technical level,” said Prof. Elsa Olivetti, who recently began working with the CSHub.
Read the article to learn how Prof. Olivetti leans on MIT’s collaborative culture to work on complex climate resilience and mitigation issues.
