In a quest to make concrete more durable and sustainable, an
international team of geologists and engineers has found inspiration in the
ancient Romans, whose massive concrete structures have withstood the elements
for more than 2,000 years
Using the Advanced Light Source at Lawrence Berkeley
National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), a research team from the University of
California, Berkeley, examined the fine-scale structure of Roman concrete. It
described for the first time how the extraordinarily stable compound –
calcium-aluminum-silicate-hydrate (C-A-S-H) – binds the material used to build
some of the most enduring structures in Western civilization.