C-Crete Technologies awarded $1.55 million from DOE to design and fabricate a prototype carbon-based building

C-Crete team will convert carbon ore to eco-friendly construction products, then design, assemble and validate a prototype building

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C-Crete Technologies

Oct 04, 2021, 08:00 ET

HOUSTON, Oct. 4, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- C-Crete Technologies has been awarded $1.55 million from the U.S. Department of Energy to design, develop and fabricate carbon-based building materials, and use them to create a prototype building. The ultimate goal is to create eco-friendly, modular structures that can be manufactured economically.

C-Crete team will convert carbon ore to eco-friendly construction products with the goal of creating modular buildings that can be manufactured economically.

"The advantage of using carbon ore as a building material is that it is naturally occurring and widely available, and thus doesn't require high amounts of energy to manufacture," says Dr. Rouzbeh Shahsavari, founder and president of C- Crete Technologies, a company specializing in advanced materials for the building and energy industries.

The prototype building will be the size of an actual room. Its component materials will be at least 70 percent carbon by weight. C-Crete's research and development will include the production and testing of a sufficient number of carbon-ore materials to ensure that the materials used in the prototype are suitable for real-world construction purposes and meet all applicable building codes, such as those for fire, strength, and other material properties.

Once the basic building shell has been constructed — walls, roof and a partial foundation — C-Crete will test the assembled materials under stress conditions to demonstrate viability, and show that the new carbon-based materials can be fastened, bonded or otherwise integrated with traditional building materials.

Further advantages of the new materials, according to Dr. Shahsavari, will include flexural strength, thermal stability, and the ability to withstand water damage and other natural means of degradation. They can be graphitic or non-graphitic, and used to make roofing tiles, bricks, beams, columns, wraps and veneers, for example.

"Our proprietary low-cost and green process converts carbon ore to a series of value-added structural materials, demonstrating the technical and financial feasibility of fabricating modular carbon-based buildings," says Dr. Shahsavari.

"In view of the current quest in the construction industry to shorten the construction timeframe, offer low-cost options, and produce minimal waste, the ability to create modular building materials based on abundant carbon ore provides an interesting alternative to the use of common construction materials," says Negar Rajabi, the tech-to-market lead of C-Crete Technologies. "Furthermore, this strategy doesn't have the large CO2 footprint inherent to the chemistry of traditional construction materials like cement. Our process provides a clean transformation of these very abundant ores into eco-friendly building materials."

C-Crete Technologies works at the intersection of materials science, nanotechnology, multiscale computations, predictive analytics, software, hardware and manufacturing to drive the next generation of innovations for a low-carbon and energy-efficient world. http://www.ccretetech.com

Denise Brehm

CONTACT:
Negar Rajabi,
[email protected]

SOURCE C-Crete Technologies