Kimberly Kurtis
Georgia Institute of Technology, GA·Engineering
Every winter, water inside concrete freezes and thaws. This cycle causes billions of dollars of damage to US roads, bridges and buildings each year.
- Fields
Engineering
Materials Science
- Topics
concrete durability
freeze-thaw damage
cementitious materials
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Nov 2027
What they work on
- Determine how entrained air voids, tiny bubbles added to protect concrete, form and stay stable in low- and zero-clinker cement materials, using multiscale experiments and advanced characterization.
- Uncover how ice and salt crystals growing together in the pores of low-clinker cement materials cause damage, combining molecular dynamics simulations with imaging and laboratory testing.
- Build a multiscale experimental and modeling framework that links pore-level features of low- and zero-clinker materials to their large-scale freeze-thaw performance.
- Develop a performance model that predicts how long low- and zero-clinker concrete lasts under freeze-thaw conditions, to guide the design of durable mixtures for cold environments.
More about the research
Climate change is expected to make freeze-thaw events more frequent and more severe. Meanwhile, the construction industry is moving toward lower-carbon cement blends that use little or no clinker, the main component of conventional cement. Little is known about how these newer materials hold up when ice and salt crystals grow inside their pores. This collaborative project aims to understand that damage from the molecular scale up to whole structures.
Why it matters
Freeze-thaw damage shortens the life of concrete infrastructure, disrupts economic activity and worsens unequal access to quality infrastructure in marginalized communities. Cold-climate cities and infrastructure owners could benefit from durable, lower-carbon concrete mixtures and a model that predicts their lifespan. These tools could help low- and zero-clinker materials see wider use, cutting carbon emissions while extending infrastructure life.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
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University of South Florida, FL·Engineering·Early-career
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Carlos Moro
Texas State University, TX·Engineering
Determine how nanoscale additives change the crystal type, growth and distribution of calcium carbonate formed when cement-based materials are exposed to carbon dioxide, across different stages of carbonation.
Julian Wang
Pennsylvania State University, PA·Engineering·Early-career
Decompose global solar irradiance into its spectral bands to build a time-dependent model of near-infrared (NIR) light, the invisible heat-carrying part of sunlight, reaching building windows.
The school
Georgia Institute of Technology: 50 labs on PI Pages, $1.5B a year on research, 572 research doctorates a year.
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