Follow the 'green' brick road?

Tormod · May 25, 2007

Researchers have found that bricks made from fly ash--fine ash particles captured as waste by coal-fired power plants--may be even safer than predicted. Instead of leaching minute amounts of mercury as some researchers had predicted, the bricks apparently do the reverse, pulling minute amounts of the toxic metal out of ambient air.

lefthttp://hypography.com/gallery/files/5/various_bricks_h_thumb.jpg[/img]Each year, roughly 25 million tons of fly ash from coal-fired power plants are recycled, generally as additives in building materials such as concrete, but 45 million tons go to waste. Fly ash bricks both find a use for some of that waste and counter the environmental impact from the manufacture of standard bricks.

"Manufacturing clay brick requires kilns fired to high temperatures," said Henry Liu, a longtime National Science Foundation (NSF) awardee and the president of Freight Pipeline Company (FPC), which developed the bricks. "That wastes energy, pollutes air and generates greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming. In contrast, fly ash bricks are manufactured at room temperature. They conserve energy, cost less to manufacture, and don't contribute to air pollution or global warming."

Once colored and shaped, the FPC bricks are similar to their clay counterparts, both in appearance and in meeting or exceeding construction-material standards.

Supported by NSF's Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program, Liu has been working since 2004 to develop the bricks. The first phase of support enabled him to make fly ash bricks more durable by engineering them to resist freezing and thawing due to weather. Liu is now working from a second-phase SBIR award to test the brick material's safety and prepare it for market.

"Green manufacturing is a focus for the nation," said Tom Allnutt of NSF's SBIR program, who oversaw Liu's award. "Liu's innovative use of fly ash to manufacture high quality building materials will potentially decrease some of the negative environmental impact of coal-fired power generation while meeting increasing demands for greener building materials."

While researchers need to study the bricks further to determine how the mercury adsorption occurs and how tightly the metal is trapped, the new findings suggest the bricks will not have a negative impact on indoor air quality.

On average, air contains low amounts of mercury that can range from less than 1 nanogram per cubic meter (ng/m3) to tens of ng/m3--a small fraction of the Environmental Protection Agency limit for continuous exposure.

Inside a confined experimental chamber, the bricks did not raise the mercury levels in the surrounding air (originally more than one nanogram), and instead appeared to lower the concentration down to roughly half a nanogram.

Engineers from FPC of Columbia, Mo., developed the bricks with NSF support and reported their findings on mercury leaching at the May 7-10, 2007, World of Coal Ash Conference in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Source: National Science Foundation

freeztar · November 7, 2007

I was just about to make a new post about this, but fortunately I decided to do a thread search first. :)

This could be revolutionary for the building world. They're cheaper than standard bricks. Right there you have all the incentive a company needs to switch over.

I was reading some media coverage of these bricks and one of the articles mentioned that Liu planned to build an 11 sq. ft. cell of these bricks to test air quality. I wonder if he has results from that yet?

One thing that does not seem to be mentioned is the comparative strengths of traditional bricks and fly ash bricks.

So far it seems like a very, very promising technology. Just look at the list of benefits :

#It is made of pure fly ash (without having to add cement, sand, aggregates, clay or binder).

#It's kiln-free manufacturing process is emission free, in contrast to the pollutants emitted by manufacturing clay bricks and cement.

#It eliminates waste disposal of fly ash and saves landfill space.

#It does not contribute to global warming--bypassing the need for burning fossil fuel as required by clay brick kilns.

# Greenest Brick will help meet LEED requirements.

# Transportation Efficiency--Greenest Brick factories can often be located

next to coal-fired power plants. In doing so, the fly ash can be transported

by pneumatic conveying directly from the power plant to the brick factory

without having to use trucks, and the products (Greenest Bricks) can be

shipped out using the same railroad that deliver the coal to the power plant.