Excited to share that our team at Worcester Polytechnic Institute:
Prof. Mingjiang Tao (PI) and Prof. Tahar El-Korchi (Co-PI) have kicked off a new three-year project sponsored by MassDOT: “Alternative Constituent Materials for Use in Low-Carbon Cement Concrete” and will be evaluating emerging binders, admixtures, and alternative materials to make highway concrete more sustainable.
The core question driving this work: can lower-carbon cementitious systems maintain, or even improve, constructability, strength, durability, and service life for real-world MassDOT applications? Through laboratory testing, durability evaluation, and advanced materials characterization, we aim to deliver practical recommendations that help reduce the embodied carbon of transportation infrastructure without compromising long-term performance.
Decarbonizing the materials that build our roads and bridges is one of the most impactful levers we have for sustainable infrastructure.
And…
$3.3M NSF’s Growing Convergence Research Award
A multidisciplinary team led by Professor Mingjiang Tao, together with Professors Carrick Eggleston and Yan Wang at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI), has received a $3.3 million award for a five-year, two-phase research project from NSF’s Growing Convergence Research (GCR) program to develop sustainable methods for recovering critical minerals and producing valuable silicon-based materials from industrial waste.
With WPI serving as the lead institution, the project brings together researchers from George Mason University, the University of California San Diego, the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and the University at Buffalo (SUNY). Inspired by organisms such as diatoms, sea sponges, and plants, which create complex silicon structures under mild natural conditions, the team will combine bioengineering, geochemistry, materials science, computational modeling, and artificial intelligence to transform silicon-rich wastes such as coal ash residue, red mud, and mine tailing into useful materials and sources of critical minerals and rare earth elements.
The project could help reduce the energy use and environmental impacts of traditional manufacturing, strengthen domestic critical-mineral supply chains, and advance a more circular economy. It will also provide interdisciplinary education, research, and workforce-development opportunities for students across the participating institutions.