[Image above] Cements 2023 attendees. Credit: ACerS
The American Ceramic Society’s Cements Division hosted the 13th Advances in Cement-Based Materials meeting from June 14–16, 2023, at Columbia University in New York. The meeting welcomed 152 attendees, including 68 students, from seven countries.
Before the conference officially started on Wednesday, the organizers held a students and young professionals networking event on Tuesday evening at the Columbia Innovation Hub in the NSF Engineering Research Center for Smart Streetscapes. The event included an academic career panel and a catered dinner from Dinosaur Bar-B-Que.
Wednesday’s program opened with a presentation by the first keynote speaker, Elise Berodier of Freyssinet (Switzerland), titled “From the ground up: Learning from field data to drive sustainable concrete construction.” Concurrent technical sessions followed.
On Thursday, Prannoy Suraneni from the Civil and Architectural Engineering Department at the University of Miami presented the second keynote, titled “Processing and reactivity of supplementary cementitious materials.” Breakout session topics included durability and service-life modeling, cement chemistry, additive manufacturing, and rheology of cementitious materials.
Mid-afternoon on Thursday, Division chair Dimitri Feys presided over the Division’s business meeting. The updates included Division membership and meeting statistics.
Division chair-elect Wil Srubar announced the 2023 Brunauer Best Paper Award, which recognizes the best cements paper published during the previous calendar year in the Bulletin or Journal of the American Ceramic Society. This year’s winning paper was “Determining the disordered nanostructure of calcium silicate hydrate (C-S-H) from broad X-ray diffractograms” by Felipe Basquiroto de Souza, Wenhui Duan, and Kwesi Sagoe-Crentsil of Monash University, Australia, published in JACerS.
The Division’s Early Career Award was presented to Wil Srubar of the University of Colorado, Boulder, by Division trustee Jeffrey Thomas.
Following the business meeting, Dale Bentz of the National Institute of Standards and Technology presented the Della Roy Lecture on “Hindsight, foresight, and insight: Calorimetry and chemical shrinkage through the years.” Bentz’s lecture was followed by the Della Roy Reception and poster session, sponsored by Elsevier. More than 20 presenters detailed their research.
Friday’s sessions began with an industry panel titled “How to bridge the gap between research and practice,” which included Scott Schneider of Thornton Tomasetti, Matthew D’Ambrosia of MJ2 Consulting, and George Perry of Black Buffalo 3D. The final break-out sessions of the conference followed.
The closing awards ceremony announced the poster session winners, who are listed below.
- First place: Sofiane Amroun, University of Miami, “Mechanical activation of inert fillers”
- Second place: Emily Mank, FAMU-FSU College of Engineering, “Development of UHPC with limestone calcined clay cement (LC3) binder-a feasibility study”
- Third place: Lyn Zemberekci, Cornell University, “Evaluation of hydration phases that form under extreme subsurface environments”
The meeting concluded with the announcement of the 2024 meeting location, which will be the Missouri University of Science and Technology in Rolla!
View more photos from the event on ACerS Flickr page. Check the ACerS website and the Bulletin in early 2024 for details about the 14th Advances in Cement-Based Materials meeting date and abstract submission deadline.