Academic research distinguished by ANID will develop green cements based on copper slag tailings

The study corresponds to the Faculty of Engineering and Sciences of the Adolfo Ibáñez University (UAI) and the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Atacama (UDA) and will be carried out until 2025, in an unprecedented technological collaboration with companies in the mining and the construction.

Andrea Riquelme, Journalist.- An applied research project will develop green cements based on copper slag tailings, obtaining the best rating in the FONDEF IDeA 2023 contest of the National Agency for Research and Development (ANID) at the national level. The study will be carried out in Copiapó, Viña del Mar and Santiago, from this year until 2025, led by a group of researchers from the Faculty of Engineering and Sciences of the Adolfo Ibáñez University (UAI) and the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Atacama (UDA), also counting on the valuable industrial contribution of two companies that join the research team, from the mining and construction sectors.

The unprecedented project embarks on the task of characterizing, developing and testing the use of a material considered today as industrial waste, as a supplementary cementitious material, fully complying with the quality standards required by the Chilean standard and reducing the carbon footprint it produces. cement manufacturing, thus contributing to a sustainable alternative to the construction industry and to the responsibility and lower environmental impact of the mining sector.

Paula Rojas, director of the Mechanical Civil Engineering career at the UAI Faculty of Engineering and Sciences, as well as research leaderpoints out that this project was qualified with the highest grade in the ANID IDeA R&D 2023 Contest – Applied Research and its value lies in the fact that “beyond a research project, it constitutes a technological and business collaboration initiative that addresses an important problem of Copiapó and other mining regions that deal with mining waste and the environmental risk that they pose, managing to solve a mining problem and improve the work of the construction sector with alternatives that meet the objective of sustainable development of innovation in these industries.

The academic comments that the first explorations of this study date back 6 years, when together with Federico Antico, doctor in civil engineering and academic of the same Faculty and Danny Guzmán of the UDAobserved that some waste from the copper mining industry had the potential to be reused in the manufacture of cement, as supplementary material, a case similar to what already occurs with steel slag and fly ash from electricity generation by burning of fossil fuels.

The carbon footprint of cement worldwide at the moment is 8% as reported by the World Economic Forum. Although Chile, as an OECD country, has led the mitigation measures to reduce its carbon footprint, the construction sector still works with cement with high percentages of Clinker (mainly responsible for the emissions produced by the manufacture of cement), and there is room to innovate. in terms of replacement of this raw material.

Paula Rojas explains that they are still working on optimizing the synthetic material produced, so that it does not over-demand the processing plants in the future, knowing that it is a highly refractory material and difficult to treat. «The material obtained has already been subjected to mechanical behavior tests in the laboratory that show the same properties as traditional cement, and even better. In the future, it would be ideal to modify the regulations to achieve a higher dosage of the supplementary cementitious material and subsequently carry out an analysis of the product’s life cycle to measure how much it reduces carbon emissions and other impacts,” said the academic.

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For his part, he academic of the Faculty of Engineering of the UDA, Dr. Danny Guzmán points out “for us as a regional university, located in an area strongly impacted by mining activity, this project is highly relevant, since it proposes an alternative to value slag tailings, an environmental liability that up to now is not being used . Finally, Dr. Guzmán indicates that “the execution of this project is part of the challenge we have as a research group to develop new production processes that are more friendly to the communities and the environment, in order to move towards a much more sustainable mining activity.” ”.