CEE Ph.D. student Marcus Cheung (Structural Materials program at SEMM) and Professor Franco Zunino have received a 2026 Daniel P. Jenny Research Fellowship from the Precast/Prestressed Concrete Institute (PCI). The $50,000 award is for their project “Optimizing Low-Paste Volume Concrete via the Compressible Packing Model for Sustainable and Cost-Effective Precast Applications.” PCI’s Research and Development Council chose the proposal as one of this year’s Jenny Fellowships. These awards support graduate students doing research that advances the precast concrete industry.
Precast plants depend on self-consolidating concrete (SCC) because it flows easily and gains strength fast enough to strip forms on a daily cycle. The cost is a high cement content, which adds significant expense and carbon. Cheung’s research tries to cut that cement while keeping SCC’s flowability, early strength, and plant throughput. The team will use the Compressible Packing Model to optimize the aggregate skeleton so the mix needs less paste. They will also use chemical accelerators to make up the early-age strength lost when clinker is reduced. Life-cycle assessment and cost analysis will check that the resulting mixes are cheaper and lower-carbon in practice. The work is carried out in the Science of Cementitious Materials (SCiM) Laboratory, in collaboration with leaders in industry such as Clark Pacific and Knife River. A PCI Project Advisory Committee will guide it to keep the results relevant to precast producers.