Has anyone had success finding an EPD for Ultra High Performance Concrete (UHPC) or even a mix design? We are doing an embodied carbon analysis of a project that used UHPC panels for the facade, and have contacted both manufacturers involved with making the material but neither were willing to disclose any information about their proprietary mix. Any help would be appreciated.
I haven’t encountered any UHPC EPDs but you could extract this information from these papers:
Ductal was able to provide an EPD for their UHPC concrete system but it is a French one. They claim to be working towards a US one soon as many folks are asking for this. Obviously this is not great but is the closest we’ve come by. Ductal-« FR - FDES Fehr.pdf (321.5 KB)
Thank you for sharing these resources! I’m hoping to at least be able to replicate the components/percentages for our study and this will help.
Thank you for sharing this! I do hope the US EPD’s for this material are coming.
Michelle,
On UPC and UHPC some work has been done on the use of particle packing (PP) and SCM’s to minimize the matrix volume and lower the heat and shrinkage implied by the higher OPC contents. One techbrief is attached. I friend used PP and SCM’s on the mix design for th eWOrld Trade center. They tested at 18,000 psi. TECHBRIEFDevelopment of Non-Proprietary Ultra-High PerformanceConcrete for Use in the Highway Bridge Sector0.pdf (1.1 MB)
In our discussions with Ductal, we surmised that emissions data for US products is unlikely to be very different from the European products since the bulk of the burden is from cement manufacturing (which in turn is mainly driven on the calcination reaction and fossil-fuel based furnaces, and not as much electricity mix of a grid region).
We also got data from TAKTL - which was very similar to Ductal. Both are about 14-15 kgCO2e/m2 for 16 mm thick panels (A1-A3 emissions). TAKTL is also working on EPDs for reduced cement products which might is expected to have 25% lower emissions.
Finally there’s the Rieder FibreC material, which isn’t UHPC but it is a similar engineered cementitious composite, reinforced with glass fibers. That EPD is available online - https://www.rieder.cc/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/EPD-RSE-2012111-EN.pdf
In summary, all of these engineered cement composites appear to have similar GWPs, which is being driven by the 50-60% cement content. The sand, glass fibers and other chemical additives don’t have as significant a GWP burden.
Michelle, Ultra High Materials, Inc. has a UHPC formulation that is superior to Ductal in performance (32K psi) and cost (~65% less) and with ~80% lower embodied carbon vs. Ductal. The specific calculation is 667 kgCO2e/m3 for Ductal and 124.5 kgCO2e/m3 for the Ultra High Materials UHPC (which uses no Portland cement). See www.ultrahighmaterials.com or you can contact jcool@ultrahighmaterials.com.