| Meet the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Bu Wang Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering |
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Research area Innovative and interdisciplinary technological solutions to address the urgent need for sustainable civil engineering materials. Current projects include carbon negative concrete; direct air capture and utilization of CO2 using industrial alkaline wastes; making cement green by low-temperature manufacturing of calcium hydroxide; utilizing CO2 to produce precipitated calcium carbonate; and fundamental behaviors of glassy materials.
What excites you about your work?
“We can sequester carbon dioxide by turning it into rock. We can even do it directly with carbon dioxide that’s super impure, like air. By doing that, we can couple carbon dioxide capture and sequestration — so we use the sequestration step to remove the energy need from the capture step. It reduces the carbon dioxide level in the atmosphere, and the whole process just happens under ambient conditions, without heat or pressurization.”
What do you hope to achieve?
“We need to ready the technology, before it is too late, for mitigating climate change. Producing a valuable by-product provides a near-term incentive for the market to adopt carbon dioxide capture and sequestration technologies. Our goal is to produce low-cost, carbon-negative cementitious materials that can be readily used by current concrete construction practices. This will provide dual benefits of removing carbon dioxide from the air and reducing the usage of cement, a carbon-intensive material.”
Bu is a visionary inventor with innovations that have the potential to change the world for the better.
– Michael Carey, WARF, Licensing Manager
Want to learn more?
Michael Carey, [email protected], 608.960.9867