Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Concrete Sustainability Hub are working on a new mixture for cement that could potentially reduce carbon dioxide emissions and boost the strength of the material without using new ingredients. According to a report in the Daily Commercial News and Construction Record on Oct. 13, researchers at the MIT Concrete Sustainability Hub have been able to feed various molecular nanostructures into computer models that allow researchers to tweak the formulation. Such modeling allows researcher to assess thousands of possibilities, bypassing the “tedious and time-consuming trial-and-error techniques that were once common in laboratory work,” according to the report.

“By understanding this material at the nanoscale, we can change its structure to reduce the CO2 associated with the material,” according to Krystyn Van Vliet, a member of the MIT team. The article notes that there has been a big drive to innovate in the field of cement and concrete in the past 20 or 30 years. “But MIT’s work would take cement to a whole new level,” says Julie Garbini of the Ready Mixed Concrete Research and Education Foundation. The Ready Mixed Concrete Research and Education and the Portland Cement Association collaborated with MIT in the formation of the MIT Concrete Sustainability Hub in 2009.

The article notes that the Concrete Sustainability Hub also released a report earlier this month predicting that concretes containing the new cement could make a big dent in the carbon footprints of new concrete buildings – perhaps even eliminating the carbon footprints altogether. The report tries to take a more complete approach to analyzing carbon footprints than previous research, according to John Ochsendorf, another MIT scientist. For example, the article quotes Ochsendorf, the group’s life-cycle analysis extends “all the way down to details of where the components come from and how they were transported.” As a result, the MIT researchers were able to “quantify emissions and potential savings, and also put a cost on them.”

The CSH Is not only working on devising new materials: It is also developing new computational techniques for predicting the behavior of a variety of materials – new and old. The new computerized approach, called computational materials science, means the ability now exists to create cement formulations that have different properties – greater stiffness, perhaps, or strength, according to the report. “Just as biologists have come to understand human DNA, understanding cement at the molecular level will allow scientists to optimize the material to meet the requirements of a job, or to make the manufacturing process more efficient.”