May 2019: Alex Brand

How do you see your work contributing to the goals and vision of IIHCC?
I see my work fitting into resilient infrastructure. The work I do relates to the materials that we use in civil engineering infrastructure. I am in the Transportation Infrastructure and Systems Engineering group (TISE), so my background is more in materials applications for roadways and pavements, particularly “how can we, more or less, reuse waste or byproduct materials in our roadway systems.” This leads to a materials sustainability perspective, mostly with regard to materials science. If you are reusing a byproduct or waste material in your roadway structure—let’s say in your concrete—what’s going on at a materials level? What’s the chemistry of that interaction, and how are we changing the failure modes of our pavement structure by using these alternative materials? One example is taking old asphalt pavements, crushing it up, and mixing it into concrete for new roadways, which was the basis of my graduate work. Do we change the failure mode of our pavement by doing this? Do we have to change our design methodology as a result? It turns out that when you do things like this, the material doesn’t behave the same anymore, so you have to start thinking about changing your design methodology.

What other areas outside of your discipline would you entertain for future research and proposal work?
Right now, I am talking with some colleagues in a few departments, kicking around some ideas. For example, how can we use novel techniques to study materials and civil infrastructure? In one project, I’m studying what is going on at the nanoscale between cement and water before it even becomes concrete—just in the first few seconds. I have been in talks with some other people about studying the corrosion of metals. We use a lot of steel and concrete in civil infrastructure, and over time that steel typically corrodes. We are trying to better understand what is going on there, particularly at the nanoscale, and specifically how the relatively high pH environment in concrete affects this. I am also working with people in geosciences, basically taking the techniques they use in geochemistry and applying them to cement. They are more of the experts on these sort of reaction kinetics. How can we apply that to my scenario of cements? I’m also working with colleagues within the Civil Engineering Department. Since I focus on concrete from more of a materials perspective, we can actually look at multiple applications, such as structural engineering as well as transportation engineering. Concrete is a very versatile material, so I’m interested in researching any application; for instance, immobilization or encapsulation of waste materials, use of recycled or by-product materials in concrete, chemical modifiers for concrete, and alternative or supplementary cementitious systems.