The SUTD-JTC Industrial Infrastructure Innovation Centre Public Talk by Professor Richard E. Riman
The SUTD-JTC Industrial Infrastructure Innovation Centre is pleased to invite you to join us for a Public Talk on 'Carbonate Concrete and Trash - A Marriage for Sustainability'.
Synopsis
The marriage of carbonate concrete with trash gasification technologies enables sustainable life cycles for a wide range of municipal consumer waste and concrete. First, fundamental aspects of each technology, namely carbonate concrete and trash gasification processes, will be discussed to identify their technological merits and barriers. For trash gasification, it provides a single automated method for the destruction of waste to minimize landfill space and provide an excellent local network of electricity. However, the CO₂ and ash generated still serves to increate rather than decrease anthropogenic CO₂ emissions. Carbonate concrete is a technology that easily integrates with the current cement and concrete supply chains and processing equipment, both critical for making concrete the most widely used material in the world. On the other hand, the water and CO₂ supply chains make it difficult to practice the technology everywhere in the world, such as in remote regions inaccessible to transportation infrastructure. This talk will show how trash gasification and carbonate concrete provide tractable solutions for each technology’s technical barriers. In addition, the impact of this concept on fundamental needs such as water, fuel, electricity, CO₂ emissions, land resources will make a historic contribution to sustainability relative to other concepts getting greater attention, such as fuel cells, batteries.
About the speaker
Richard Riman is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Rutgers University. His research is focused on the discovery and development of green manufacturing methods for the production of ceramics in order to provide sustainable solutions to significant technological and environmental problems. His use of hydrothermal technology spans photonic, biomedical, electronic and structural fields. He founded Solidia Technologies, a company providing green construction materials for buildings and infrastructure, and, RRTC. He holds a B.S. degree in Ceramic Engineering from Rutgers and a Ph.D. from MIT in Materials Science and Engineering. He is the recipient of research awards from NIH, NSF, ALCOA, DuPont, Johnson & Johnson, the American Ceramic Society, and the 2013 R&D 100 new materials innovation award.