Special issue on Accelerated Carbonation

Carbonation is a natural phenomenon affecting commonly used cementitious materials, which can have detrimental effects on structural concrete. The accelerated carbonation of wastes is a controlled accelerated version of the naturally occurring process. At a time when rapidly changing legislation is promoting the recycling and re-use of waste materials, the emergence of technologies that can utilise both gaseous and solid waste products in re-useable materials is timely. Thus, this special issue of Minerals Engineering reviews the current state of the art and potential future developments in the application of accelerated carbonation technology. This is outside the usual scope of Minerals Engineering, but is an area that will assume increasing importance in the minerals industry with the need to reduce CO2 emissions and recycle or utilise waste products, so I thanks the Guest Editors, Tom Van Gerven, Rafael M. Santos and Ozlem Cizer, of KU Leuven, Belgium, for suggesting Minerals Engineering as the medium for publication.

In 2013, the KU Leuven hosted the 4th Edition of the International Conference on Accelerated Carbonation for Environmental and Materials Engineering. ACEME 2013 followed the three successful previous editions held in London/UK (Jun-2006), Rome/Italy (Oct-2008), and Turku/Finland (Nov-2010). The ACEME conferences aim at promoting research and development activities on accelerated carbonation at an international level, favouring knowledge sharing and critically discussing future development and implementation in the field.

The objectives of the 4th Edition were to communicate and discuss the latest advances in the field of theoretical and applied research on accelerated carbonation of various types of natural materials and industrial residues. Processing conditions, product properties and (on-line) analysis at lab-, pilot- and full-scale were the key focus themes of the conference. The conference also aimed at promoting mineral carbonation in the context of Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) and Carbon Capture and Utilization (CCU).

Among the 62 contributions, 14 were selected to be published in the special issue. The bulk of the papers report on the reaction kinetics, mineralogical properties and leaching behaviour in various materials that include serpentine, mining residues, oil shale ash, metallurgical slag and hydrated cement. The use of biological catalysts, a rather new development in the field of mineral carbonation is also highlighted.