Transcriber: Ilze Garda Reviewer: Denise RQ
One of the major problems that the world is facing right now
is pollution, especially pollution caused by burning fossil fuels.
The primary sources of that are industrial plants and vehicle exhaust.
Fortunately, in the United States,
43% of the combustion residue of industrial plants are filtered.
One of the great applications of this filtered material
is using it as a supplement in concrete.
Adding combustion residue to concrete
not only increases the strength, stability, and workability of the product
but will also decrease the cost of producing it.
Then this high-quality and cheap material will be used to build roads and buildings.
The cycle is shown is this figure.
They filter the pollution, send it to the concrete manufacturers,
and they add a proper amount to their product,
increase the quality, bring down the price,
and then it will be used to build different things for us.
Now, when you look at this cycle,
it looks like a very easy and a straightforward cycle.
You might even ask yourself,
"Then what is this guy doing on this stage wasting our time?"
But unfortunately, it's not as easy and straightforward as it looks.
Adding combustion residue to concrete
is not like adding salt and pepper to your food.
If you add too much salt to your food,
you'll just be like, "Oops, oh, make sure to drink more water with my dinner."
But combustion residue coming from different industrial plants
have different impurities of different amounts,
and all these differences will have a huge effect
on the quality of the final product.
That is when we get involved into this cycle.
Mr. Pistol Pete up there is representing us at OSU.
Concrete manufacturers send us samples of their combustion residue,
and when we look at them under the microscope,
we see tiny, egg-shaped particles like that;
they are in the scale of micron.
For us, to understand these particles better,
we use X-ray.
Using X-ray, we scan different layers of that egg-shaped particle.
The result of a scanning using X-ray is a greyscale image like that one.
Now, my personal expertise
is machine vision and artificial intelligence.
So using image-processing algorithms,
we have developed this program that will enable the computer
to segment different regions of impurity in that cross-section.
The cool thing about this program is that we are using the same models
that human visual cortex is using for detecting different patterns.
The results are incredible, they are very accurate.
Actually, this slice is showing the result of segmentation
using our method on that specific cross-section.
Different regions of impurities are color-marked,
and different colors mean different material.
Now, [the] computer uses this program that we have developed
and then applies it
on about 400 to 500 different slices throughout that egg-shaped particle,
puts all the data together, sums them up and reports them in a table like that.
That table is telling us exactly what material and in what amount exists
in that batch of combustion residue that we've received.
We'll then report this data back to the concrete manufacturers,
and now they know exactly
how much of that combustion residue to add to their product
to get to the proper quality they are looking for.
Right now, a group of scientists at OSU are working on this project
- different researchers, students -
and I am very fortunate and proud to be a part of this.
Hopefully, one day we'll bring this technology to a point
that even the exhaust of our personal automobiles
will be filtered, recycled, and used
to make our lives easier and more convenient,
and also pollution-free.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)