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Seminar

Seminar: Dr. Congrui Grace Jin

Fungi-Mediated Self-Healing Concrete for Sustainable and Resilient Infrastructure

Date:
Time:
3:30 pm – 4:30 pm
Scott Engineering Center Link Room: N105
Additional Info: SLNK
Sustainable infrastructure is the key to creating a sustainable community, due to its significant impact on energy consumption, land use, and global economy. However, our nation is facing the downfall of progressively aging infrastructure that needs rehabilitation. In particular, concrete infrastructure suffers from serious deterioration. Under such circumstances, self-healing of harmful cracks without human interference or intervention could be of great attraction. Our study explored a new self-healing concept in which fungi are used as a self-healing agent to promote calcium mineral precipitation to fill the cracks in concrete infrastructure. The experimental results showed that, due to the leaching of Ca(OH)2 from concrete, the pH of the growth medium increased from its original value of 6.5 to 13.0. Despite the drastic pH increase, some species of fungi germinated into hyphal mycelium and grew equally well with or without concrete. To maximize the production of calcium carbonate, a combination of in situ/operando material characterization techniques were used to study how the formation and growth rate of the biominerals are related to the various factors influencing fungal calcium precipitation. A model was produced based on numerical simulation to optimize the amount, size, shape, and distribution of healing agent-containing capsules or porous carriers to achieve effective self-healing without inflicting any negative effect on concrete strength. The most appropriate low-cost materials was discovered as fungal protection materials in concrete matrix.

Dr. Congrui Jin received a BS degree in Electrical Engineering from Nankai University, China. She earned her MS in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada and received the Ph.D. with a major in Solid Mechanics and a minor in Applied Mathematics from Cornell University in 2012. Prior to joining SUNY Binghamton as an assistant professor in 2015, she was a postdoctoral scientist in the Materials Science and Technology Division at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and then the Department of Civil Engineering at Northwestern University.

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