Abstract

Durable and Sustainable Concrete; Why the “little things” matter.

Concrete and other cement-based materials dominate the construction market due to their relatively low cost, wide availability, shape forming flexibility during casting, energy efficiency, and ability to achieve needed levels of strength and volumetric stability.  However, as with other construction materials, 21st century concrete construction practices are increasingly driven by the issues of durability and sustainability, rather than by strength considerations.  These issues include the need to extend the service life of existing infrastructure, reduction in maintenance costs, and the threat of global warming due to increased emissions of greenhouse gases (mainly CO2).  This presentation will explore how an understanding and control of the microstructure of concrete can help address its durability problems and offer the potential for “engineering” of cement-based materials with improved performance characteristics.  Understanding of the concrete microstructure is challenging, as it changes during the service life of a structure and includes features over a wide range of length scales (from meters to nanometers).  This presentation will demonstrate that changes in the quality of the concrete matrix at the lower end of the length scale (in the micrometer and nanometer range) can have a profound effect on the bulk properties of the material (at the meter scale), thus underscoring the notion that it is the “little things” that matter.

Biography

Jan Olek holds M.S.C.E (airports and pavements -Cracow University of Technology, Poland, 1978), M.S.C.E (structures -University of Texas at Austin, 1984) and Ph.D. (materials -Purdue University, 1987). He has been on the faculty of the Lyles School of Civil Engineering at Purdue University since 1994 and is the American Concrete Pavement Association (ACPA) Indiana Chapter Faculty Scholar. He also serves as the Director of the North Central Superpave Center (NCSC) and of the Pankow Materials Laboratory.  Prior to joining the ranks of the faculty at Purdue, he was a faculty member at the Colorado School of Mines and at Penn State University.

Dr. Olek’s research interests include durability of concrete, behavior of concrete and asphalt materials in pavement applications, characterization of microstructure of porous materials, use and characterization of supplementary cementitious materials, and behavior of materials used for repair of concrete.  He teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in civil engineering materials, experimental methods, materials science of concrete, corrosion of reinforcement and sustainable binders. He has over 190 technical publications in scientific journal and conference proceedings and graduated 21 MS and 23 PhD students.
Dr. Olek is the former Fulbright Scholar, a Fellow of the American Concrete Institute (ACI) and is the recipient of the ACI’s Delmar L. Bloem Distinguished Service Award. He currently serves on the ACI Technical Activities Committee and the ACI Board of Nominations.  He has been named the Distinguished Alumni of the Cracow University of Technology, elected Honorary Member of the Taiwanese Road Society and is the corresponding member of the Committee of Civil Engineering of the Polish Academy of Sciences.

Watch Dr. Olek's Presentation