On clinker and cement production: progress has been made in thermodynamic modelling and process understanding. A CALPHAD-based model was developed to predict clinker mineralogy, benchmarked against experimental data (XRF, XRD), and integrated with industrial datasets. Work has also focused on quantifying the influence of minor elements on clinker phase development and on linking clinker phase assemblage models with hydration kinetics models.
On SCM activation and quality prediction: thermal, mechanical, and chemical activation routes were systematically explored. Advances include quantification of the thermochemical process of kaolinitic clay calcination, the design and operation of a wet carbonation reactor to study carbonation behaviour of recycled cement paste and steel slags, and correlations between grinding parameters and the reactivity of mechanically activated clays—generating data for model development.
At the concrete scale, the core of the Concrete Mix Database (>4k mixes) has been finalized, along with data standardization pipelines enabling machine learning workflows for strength prediction. Work is ongoing to evaluate the impact of material variability using concrete production data, and significant progress has been made in chloride testing at paste scale—contributing towards establishing multi-scale durability correlations.
On the digitalization front: latent-variable models (PLS) have been developed to predict alite fraction from process data, and hybrid ML and causality-based approaches are being applied to clinker quality prediction and mix optimization. RFID performance for material traceability has been successfully evaluated, while a mini-scale carbonation unit with integrated RGB-D monitoring has been designed and validated, setting specifications for decentralized SCM process models.
On process and product sustainability: a first study has been completed on low-carbon cement market formation in Latin America, alongside preparation of firm-level diffusion analyses. A disaggregated life cycle inventory of alternative cementitious materials has also been compiled, supporting transparent multi-criteria evaluations of their technical, environmental, and economic performance.
