Monitoring of Feedstock Materials & Smart Manufacturing Systems for Low Carbon Concrete

Smart sensors and automated manufacturing processes can enable quality-assured production of geopolymer concrete from recovered materials and reduce the carbon footprint of housing, civil and energy infrastructure works and marina construction materials. Geopolymer is a new cementitious binder with lower carbon footprint than Ordinary Portland Cement (OPC) and the development of geopolymer from waste-derived materials contributes to Circular Economy. However, unlike OPC which is made from limestone and clay where the quality and consistency of these finite virgin materials extracted from the natural environment can be assured, the quality and consistency of waste-derived materials like coal flyash, mine tailings, mineral processing residues, metal slags and other industrial byproducts cannot be assured. Moreover, once these feedstock materials are used to manufacture geopolymer concrete the use of hazardous alkali-activating chemicals is required. Therefore, the use of advanced monitoring and control is applied at three levels: 1) assessment of the waste materials at their source (eg tailings storage facilities) with RPA (drones), 2) monitoring of the waste materials during pre-treatment to become feedstock with advanced sensors (eg X-Ray Fluorescence XRF) and 3) robotics and automation for the chemical handling plant, mixing of the feedstock materials into the reactor vessel and casting of the resultant concrete into the moulds.