Summer 2016 Internship

For my 6-week summer internship, I worked at The Catholic University of America's Vitreous State Laboratory. I created and tested geopolymer samples, an eco-friendly concrete alternative. The main portion of my tests were for compressive strength, initial and final set time, rheology, and heat release. I worked with Dr. Gong, Dr. Xu, and Dr. Pegg mainly. In this contribution, we discovered the synergetic effect in geopolymerization and explored the mechanism responsible for it for the first time to bring a deeper insight into the more complicated geopolymerization process whenever multiple raw materials are involved. Ternary fly ash-metakaolin- blast furnace slag and binary fly ash-metakaolin geopolymers were synthesized and analyzed by isothermal calorimetry, SEM/EDS, automatic Vicat, and compressive strength. It was found that co-geopolymerization of multiple materials generated significant extra hydration heats, as compared to the sums calculated from the calorimetric data for the single raw material systems. Formation of hybrid C-(A)- S-H and (C,N)-A- S-H gels was confirmed by SEM/EDS, whereas extraordinarily high compressive strength of 115.0 MPa was achieved at room temperature. Although further investigations are still needed, the authors believe that the interactions between two and/or among more subsystems, which led to hybrid gels formation and possible self-optimization of activating conditions, are responsible for the synergetic effect. Below, you can see more pictures, my presentation to the VSL group of doctors and engineers, the published research paper I contributed to, and pictures of my graph results for my data of tested variables.