I wander if there are other food waste products that can also be used? It would be awesome if they found somethings that was a waste product from food mass-production, something what is available in bulk with simple logistics.
Glossary for the people here who haven't taken classes from people really particular about it:
* Cement is the 'glue' part
* Concrete is Cement + small aggregate (sand) + large aggregate (gravel)
* Cement doesn't dry, it cures, and the water becomes bound in gels between the cementitious minerals. If it does dry out (due to fire, or prior to curing), it loses its strength.
* The trucks aren't cement mixers, they're concrete mixers.No probably about it. The article says it can replace some portion of the sand usually used in making concrete
Turns out that the most significant difference is that in concrete (or any cementitious material), the important molecular bonds are covalent. In adobe the bonds are ionic.
Consequently, adding water to adobe easily disrupts the structure by interfering with the ionic bonds (just as it when salt dissolves in), but does essentially nothing to the covalent bonds in concrete.
Even cooler, perhaps, is that as the wet adobe dries out again, the same bonds will reform, and you get back to the original state again.
Fly ash is pozzolanic, it can be used to replace 30% or more of the cement in concrete.
"Cementing CO2 into C-S-H: A step toward concrete carbon neutrality" (2023) https://academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/article/2/3/pgad052/70895...
Looks like Baking Soda / Sodium Bicarbonate may also be useful for Hydrogen storage:
"A baking soda solution for clean hydrogen storage" (2023) PNNL scientists investigate the promising properties of a common, Earth-abundant salt https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/06/230612200329.h...
Sodium Bicarbonate is made from Sodium Carbonate.
Sodium Bicarbonate: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium_bicarbonate
Sodium Carbonate: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium_carbonate :
> Historically, it was extracted from the ashes of plants grown in sodium-rich soils. Because the ashes of these sodium-rich plants were noticeably different from ashes of wood (once used to produce potash), sodium carbonate became known as "soda ash".[12][full citation needed] It is produced in large quantities from sodium chloride and limestone by the Solvay process, as well as by carbonating sodium hydroxide
Sadly, we also need to use less coffee, since the increase in coffee consumption in Asia is about to cause an explosion in tropical forest land re-use ...
I wonder, though, what adding coconut husk to concrete would do, if it were ground up like coffee...