Collaborative Research: Using Microbes to Predict Concrete Durability and Resilience

Concrete is the most-used building material in the world, and concrete structures are typically designed to have service lives of 80-100 years. However, service life can be hard to predict, because it depends on many factors such as the specific concrete mixture, how the structure is used, and local weather conditions as it ages. In the United States, as roads, bridges, foundations, and other concrete infrastructure age, accurate prediction of service life is increasingly important for planning maintenance, repairs, and replacement. Recent work has shown that concrete hosts a variety of microbes. This research will leverage advances in DNA sequencing to connect the microbes in concrete to its strength, durability, and longevity. This work will address this challenge systematically, leading to improved predictions of service life for different types of concrete as they age in different environmental conditions. To ensure that all climatic regions in the nation are represented in the research, a standard workflow for analyzing the microbes in concrete will be developed and distributed to undergraduate researchers nationwide, who will contribute parallel but independent analyses of structural concrete. The work will uncover how microbes affect concrete structures and will use that knowledge to develop new tools for predicting infrastructure lifespans, enhancing infrastructure planning systems nationwide. Microbiome analysis is now used to identify and predict disease states in humans, plants, and environmental systems. Although concrete is an inhospitable environment, a small but active community of microbes inhabits concrete and changes over time, reflecting the starting materials, environmental exposure, and damage. This work will apply high-throughput sequencing and machine learning methods to concrete made with a variety of mixture designs and subjected to different aging conditions to identify microbes associated with concrete performance metrics, with the ultimate goal of using microbiome data to predict concrete longevity. The results will have applications in predicting and even enhancing concrete durability and service life, as well as implications for bio-inspired or biologically produced building materials. Additionally, research protocols will be developed for use by undergraduate researchers around the country, and the DNA they extract from their samples will be sequenced to address the question of whether concrete microbiomes vary geographically. This component will engage undergraduates in original research in the context of their own communities, while broadening the number of geographic and climatic regions contributing data to the project. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.