Oregon State University has received a $540,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to reduce the carbon footprint of the construction industry by sequestering carbon within cement.

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The grant will span three years of research and was awarded to Pavan Akula of OSU and his partners from Sandia National Laboratory in India.

This comes after preliminary research in their proposal introduced a method to capture and trap carbon dioxide emitted by industrial processes within 3D-printed cement.

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“Improving sustainability is quite important for the construction industry moving forward,”  said Akula, an associate professor in the College of Engineering. “It’s associated with almost 13% of the global CO2 emission.”

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Even though 3D printing cement requires less manual labor and has proven to be more efficient than conventional processes, it still uses Portland cement, the primary construction material in most countries, which yields high CO2 emissions when manufactured, Akula said.

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“This process that we are trying to develop with Sandia and the partners in India is to look at capturing some of the CO2 and trapping it into the concrete that we are making now,” Akula said. “Here we are trying to reduce the amount of CO2 footprint of that 3D printable material by plugging in some of the CO2 back into the material.”

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Read the full article on The Daily Barometer's website here.