so i’m jason ideker, i’m an assistant professor here at oregon state university in the school of civil and construction engineering. i’ve been here about three years and i was hired in the area of innovative materials. one of the interesting classes that we’re able to offer is a green building materials class.
oregon state university 3d printing, so the green building materials class is fairly unique, certainly for oregon state and for the university system throughout the entire united states. so we focus on green building materials,
it’s more about developing a toolbox for the students so that when a manufacturer comes to them when they’re working and says, “hey, i’ve got this great new material, you should use this in your construction project.†they know the questions they should ask about that material. one of the research projects that we have is looking into using recycled concrete as aggregate in new concrete. there’s kind of a stigma that exists that if you’re taking recycled concrete product and putting it into new concrete that it’s a substandard material.
that isn’t really true, our whole research focus on that right now is to really quantify what that deterioration mechanism is, how severe it is, and what we need to do to new concrete
so that it’s not susceptible to that type of deterioration. so that an end user can use materials with high-recycled content, they can use more environmentally friendly materials and still have some confidence behind using that material.
