DMREF: Reinventing Cement Production through Flash Joule Heating

About This Grant

Cement is the backbone of modern infrastructure, used in everything from buildings and roads to bridges and energy systems. Yet, its production is among the most energy-intensive industrial processes, accounting for 2-3 percent of global energy use and approximately 9 percent of human-made CO2 emissions. Traditional cement manufacturing relies on fossil-fuel-based kilns that heat materials to extreme temperatures for hours, making the process inefficient, costly and difficult to electrify. As global demand rises due to population growth and aging infrastructure, there is an urgent need for new production methods that improve energy efficiency, reduce cost and environmental impact, and maintain high performance. This Designing Materials to Revolutionize and Engineer our Future (DMREF) project introduces flash Joule heating (FJH), an electrified process that rapidly heats raw materials to extreme temperatures in seconds—enabling fast, energy-efficient synthesis of cement clinker. Its compact, modular nature supports decentralized production, reducing transportation-related costs and emissions while enabling local use of raw materials and industrial wastes. By integrating advanced synthesis, modeling, experiments, and AI-guided optimization, this project seeks to revolutionize cement production while training the next generation of engineers and scientists in materials science, civil engineering, and artificial intelligence. This project will establish flash Joule heating as a scientifically grounded, electrified method for synthesizing cement clinker and minerals with ultrahigh energy efficiency and phase selectivity. Unlike conventional kilns, FJH applies short, high-power electrical pulses to heat raw materials above 3000 K in seconds, enabling the rapid formation of reactive clinker phases present in conventional cement clinker, such as tricalcium silicate, dicalcium silicate, and tricalcium aluminate, but at significantly lower energy cost. The research integrates thermodynamic modeling, atomistic simulations, and advanced characterization to uncover high-temperature reaction mechanisms and guide FJH process optimization. The resulting FJH clinker will be evaluated in terms of mineralogy, atomic structure, reaction kinetics and mechanisms, pore structure and engineering performance (e.g., workability, strength development, durability). These insights will inform the design of blended cements incorporating FJH clinker and supplementary cementitious materials to deliver high performance at low cost. The work will be supported by life cycle and techno-economic analyses, along with AI-driven modeling to accelerate synthesis optimization and formulation discovery. This closed-loop framework supports electrified, decentralized cement production with unprecedented energy efficiency. By tightly integrating synthesis, multiscale modeling, experimental validation, and AI-guided design, the project directly advances the goals of DMREF and the Materials Genome Initiative—accelerating materials discovery and deployment in a critical industrial sector. 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.