Partnership applies data science to mix design, curing, finished concrete

Sources: Solidia Technologies, Piscataway, N.J.; Uncountable Inc., San Francisco; CP staff

Solidia Technologies has teamed with start up Uncountable to build an analytics platform expediting research & development and commercial application surrounding the former company’s low carbon cement and concrete. Using data science, machine learning and artificial intelligence, the platform will equip Solidia and its customers to improve production and finished elements or structures by trialing myriad concrete formulations without years of experimentation. It serves as a bridge between a northern New Jersey headquarters lab and optimization at concrete plants during pilot and commercial phases.

Chemical-intensive processes where the Uncountable platform has been deployed include rubber, a material whose formulation, temperature phases and engineering property index have direct parallels to concrete. The technology can speed analysis and manipulation of data generated during the mixing, placing and carbon dioxide-based curing of Solidia concrete—enabling users to cut development time, reduce testing iterations and identify enhanced production methods and mix designs faster than present practice.

“Because our chemistry is simple, we can model, measure and predict the manufacturing process, and quantify performance and impact improvements,” says Solidia CEO Tom Schuler. The company is working with Uncountable to expedite evaluation of the broad space of chemistries available for concrete formulations, he adds, contending, “Never before has the industry had eyes inside the curing chamber or a means of rapid-fire testing that can expedite production upgrades and efficiencies, new recipes, and improved performance in concrete. We’re spearheading the data revolution in cement and concrete, bringing sustainable solutions and process optimization faster to a global industry.”

“[Our] tools accelerate development of the most robust process for Solidia Concrete,” affirms Uncountable Founder Noel Hollingsworth, who leads a team of Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford University engineering graduates. “Powered by artificial intelligence algorithms, our platform mitigates the need for tedious, manual tweaking of individual ingredients. Complicated development processes that would involve tens or hundreds of experiments are now conducted by Solidia in half the time utilizing advanced machine learning models.”