Recent update on the environmental impact of geopolymers

By G. Habert, Claudiane Ouellet-Plamondon. 2016

324 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The contribution of building materials’ production to environmental impacts becomes significant in the new energy efficient buildings that are currently built. Among those materials, cement represents a major part of the embodied carbon footprint of buildings. Development of alternatives to traditional Portland cement have emerged over the last decades; however, their environmental assessment over their life cycle have resulted in conflicting results, which give a confusing picture of the strategic path to be followed. This paper focuses on the alkali-activated cement and concrete and points out the variability linked with the choice of energy source for the production of the activators and precursors. A review of existing studies is then performed in order to highlight the main benefits of these alternative cements in terms of reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. Finally, the results presented here highlight further research trends for new cements and concrete.

Subfields: Building and Construction, Civil and Structural Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/dd5c14a967817ddfec2e8892996498f8c41a060c

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Building and Construction

1. Zhenming Li
2. Guang Ye
3. J. Yliniemi
4. M. Illikainen
5. Pascaline Patureau
6. T. Luukkonen
7. A. Marsh
8. Y. Pontikes

In Civil and Structural Engineering

1. Zhenming Li
2. Guang Ye
3. T. Luukkonen
4. Shizhe Zhang
5. M. Illikainen
6. Paivo Kinnunen
7. Suhong Yin
8. B. Ghiassi

Citations in the corpus

• Fracture properties and microstructure formation of hardened alkali-activated slag/fly ash pastes (2021, background): “are environmental-friendly and need only moderate energy to produce [2].”
• Production of sodium silicate powder from waste glass cullet for alkali activation of alternative binders (2019, unknown): “Other production methods are available, e.g. dissolution of quartz sand with sodium hydroxide in a reactor, but the energy requirements are again usually high [2,7-9].”
• Advances in alkali-activation of clay minerals (2020, background): “Significant progress has been made in recent years in understanding the fundamental mechanisms of the activation process of AAMs [9–12], as well as more applied aspects such as appropriate testing procedures [10,13] and life cycle analysis [14].”
• One-part alkali-activated materials : a review (2018, background): “Habert and OuelletPlamondon [191] compared economic allocation of one-part geopolymers and found that it would be possible to achieve an 80% reduction in costs compared with OPC.”