Decreasing the Environmental Impact of Cement with Data-Driven Design

Concrete is the most widely used building material in the world with an estimated global annual production of 30 billion metric tons. Largely because of this scale, the concrete industry is estimated to produce approximately 8% of all global CO2 emissions, therefore decreasing the carbon footprint of the concrete industry is an important consideration for the global decarbonization effort. In this talk, I will present a method to design concretes with decreased global warming potential using an optimization framework which relies upon quality attributes estimated from an amortized Gaussian process model. Using industrial data, our approach proposed novel concrete formulations with 60% reductions in climate impact. I will also demonstrate how the model can be used to accelerate experimentation.