CAREER: CAS- Climate: Engineering greenhouse gas-sequestering infrastructure materials through integrated life cycle and material performance analysis

This award is funded in whole or in part under the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (Public Law 117-2). A critical challenge facing society is reconciling the growing demand for infrastructure materials, which cause significant greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from manufacturing, with meeting goals to mitigate further climate damage. Yet there is a substantial potential environmental benefit of infrastructure materials: their long service lives can facilitate extended storage of GHGs, in particular by sequestering carbon in their structures.

Wood is an example of a material of construction that sequesters atmospheric carbon by incorporating it through photosynthesis. Concrete and other infrastructure materials of construction are also able to sequester carbon. There remains a need for a theoretical and empirical foundation from which to build and capitalize on this opportunity.

The goal of this research is to formulate new understanding of driving mechanisms to engineer infrastructure materials to sequester GHGs, while minimizing environmental impacts stemming from the production of infrastructure materials. The focus will be on infrastructure woods, concrete, and plastics, culminating in an understanding of the global sequestration potential from these materials.

This research will be integrated into the educational goals of broadening the participation of underrepresented groups in engineering and instilling an environmental sustainability perspective for future engineers.

This research will be implemented through a three-part methodology: (1) Deriving methods needed to understand the effects of resource flows and process selection on the environmental impacts from infrastructure materials. (2) Integrating material performance into environmental impact comparisons to understand how new materials can be engineered for GHG sequestration. (3) Elucidating mechanisms to drive GHG sequestration in infrastructure materials. This research will investigate a systematic approach to engineering GHG-sequestering infrastructure materials through coupled probabilistic environmental impact assessment and material performance modeling.

Specifically, the research targets: (1) characterizing the environmental impacts associated with unstudied resource flows; (2) understanding the largest drivers in environmental impacts and impact uncertainties from producing infrastructure materials, as well as mechanisms to lower them; (3) formulating models to link material performance to GHG-fluxes associated with material production, longevity, and disposal to determine thresholds at which GHG-sequestration occurs and sequestration potential for new materials; and (4) discovering the most effective strategies to manage material resources to drive GHG-sequestration. This work will elucidate new opportunities for material technologies, with potential to transfer to other classes of materials and to chemicals.

The educational goals will be achieved through three tasks: (1) Constructing an interactive museum exhibit showing environmental impacts from anthropogenic material demand to support environmental literacy in K-12 students. (2) Initiating a community-engaged first-year undergraduate course-based research experience with the aim of attracting and retaining underrepresented groups in engineering. (3) Incorporating research findings into a chapter for the new edition of “Concrete: Microstructure, Properties, and Materials,” a globally used graduate textbook.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.