SEMINAR: Re-generating End-of-Life Materials (EoL-M) as Supplementary Cementitious Materials (SCMs) for Ordinary Portland Cement (OPC): An Introduction into 14 Years-long Research Efforts

Abstract: Cement Industry is notorious with its big carbon foot print, about 8% of the global CO2 production. Cement manufacturers are in constant search for remedies and mitigation strategies that will make them less harmful to environment and climate. The main portion of the CO2 during cement manufacturing comes from the calcination of the main raw material CaCO3. Another significant portion is due to the burning of fuels to reach the high temperatures (>1450°C) required to produce the ideal Portland cement phase composition.

An obvious choice is to reduce the amount of the OPC, the main binder, in blended cements. In our EU-project, ReCEMENT, we chose to re-generate materials that served their useful lives and were discarded (EoL-M) as Supplementary Cementitious Materials. They were expected to behave either as cementitious, puzzolanic, or as activators. Altogether 21 different discarded materials were investigated under the umbrella of ReCEMENT Project. We investigated an additional 6 raw materials from ex-mines during AkCanSA-project. All these candidate materials can be activated at much lower temperatures than what is required for OPC production. All candidates had much lower CO2 release percentages than raw materials used for OPC. Out of this selection, about 12 candidates worked better than OPC when they replaced up to 30 wt% of OPC in blended cement mixtures. With the experience gained we tried to define what it takes to make a waste material a good candidate for an SCM to replace OPC. These successful candidates offer a significant financial advantage to cement manufacturers (a 2024 market of $505Billion).

Bio: Dr. Mehmet Ali Gulgun graduated with a BSc. in Mechanical Eng’g in 1988 (Bogazici U), with an MSc. ‘n Mechanics, Metallurgy and Materials Science in 1990 (MSU), and a PhD in Ceramics Engineering in 1996 (UIUC), Postdoc-ed at Tokyo Inst. Tech. (1996), Max-Planck inst. (1996-2000), at SU since Sept 2000. He works with electron microscopes on interfaces, conducts research in sintering, grain growth in polycrystalline materials, synthesis of multi-cation oxides (which is coiled lately as high entropy oxides) for fuel cell applications, cements and cementitious composites, materials characterization, a member of Ceramics Research Group at SU.