New era for cement replacement materials: Importance of service life design (NewDurCem)

Our developed societies require a built environment that is unimaginable without the widespread use of cement-based materials that allow cheap construction anywhere with complex and massive shapes.

However, cement production is associated with 8% of the total global anthropogenic CO2 emissions, which has created a lot of challenges in construction sector to deal with.

Although, use of industrial waste like fly ash or slag as cement replacement materials for manufacturing concrete with lower cement clinker content has been an answer to tackle this challenge, but expected lower availability of these materials in the near future has been another recent obstacle.

This has brought a lot of attention to natural resources like clays as well bio-based wastes such as bio ashes to be considered as future alternative cement replacements.

However, industrial application of these new alternative binders is still dependent on further research mainly in terms of service life or durability of these new engineered binders.Therefore, aiming to demonstrate the potentials of activated clays and bio ashes as a clinker replacement (future green binders) to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and environmental impact when constructing infrastructure buildings made from concrete, we wish to carry out a study to investigate on service life expectations with focus on chloride corrosion and frost attack for concrete infrastructures manufactured with incorporation of these future green binders.