Earlier this year, professor in Engineering Nishant Garg and his team developed a test that can analyze the performance of construction materials within five minutes. It’s a major improvement over the traditional method, which is much more expensive and takes seven days or more.
Before he developed the rapid test, Garg faced an issue — with the number of students in his lab, it could take one person up to three months to test the performance of a construction material.
“So there was a backlog there and I realized, ‘What if we could develop something a little faster?’” Garg said. “It turns out this kind of backlog exists at many places, and seven days is just not fast enough if you want to do quality control in real time.”
Garg said the amount of aluminum and silicon a construction material contains can predict its reactivity, and the more reactive a construction material is, the greater its ability to strengthen concrete and mortar over time.
The test starts by dissolving the material in an alkaline solution. Then, researchers can measure the concentrations of aluminum and silicon released into the solution.
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With the traditional testing method, researchers must send the samples and data to a laboratory for a long, costly analysis. This analysis provides data about the reactivity and, thus, the quality of the material.
But Garg’s new test bypasses that process. By adding a coloring agent and quantifying the color change with a device called a colorimeter, the researchers found a correlation between the color change and the performance of the material.
Garg and his team spent time developing and refining the testing conditions in order to find this correlation. To verify their results, they compared their data to standardized data from the traditional, seven-day test.
“It took a lot of trial and error, but finally we nailed down the right conditions, and we got a very good correlation on over 50 samples,” Garg said.
The test offers a significantly faster and cheaper testing method compared to traditional approaches without sacrificing accuracy, according to Garg.
“They just put (one gram of their sample) into the instrument and the instrument does the test fully automated for them, and they get the final number in the end, which correlates with performance,” Garg said.
Garg’s next goal involves automating and industrializing the test. Then, he says, researchers around the world will be able to buy and run it themselves, which he hopes will provide further verification of its accuracy.
“If other labs around the world replicate this test on their materials — on their local materials in different parts of the world — and see what kind of results and accuracy they get, I think that would be very nice, and we’re already getting interest from many people who are trying to pursue this in their labs,” Garg said. “We have now tested a lot more samples, and they continue to fall on that correlation that we have originally published.”
Most feedback from industry partners has been positive.
“They’re all very happy with the possibility that they could reduce the testing time from seven days to five minutes,” Garg said. “Plus, they could have real-time quality control at the large scale when they’re making something — they can see in real time the material’s quality to be consistent.”
In the future, Garg hopes to determine what other materials the test can be applied to.
“What we’re trying to do right now is extend this test to other materials,” Garg said. “There are other similar supplementary materials such as coal-based flashes, blast furnace slags, natural porcelains and all these other materials.”
The test has shown a promising future in improving the time and efficiency of developing new construction materials. Garg hopes it can save researchers around the world time, money and labor.
“We should make the tests and the equipment as low cost as possible so we save money,” Garg said. “If my research can lead to savings in time, money, as well as automation, I would say that would be an impact I’ll be happy with.”
Read Garg and his team’s full publication here.
