This is scientific American 60 second science. I'm Christopher Intagiyata.

There's a stretch of highway in Pennsylvania along US 422.

And like every probably 20 feet you see like a big pothole or cracking at the joint like everywhere. It was so bad.

Yagub Farnam is a construction materials engineer at Drexel University in Philly, and this road is pretty much

his worst nightmare.

Yeah, just imagine I was

was driving I was so mad I mean what is going on on this

the culprit he says may be calcium chloride road salt it's's used to de-ice highways in the winter.

Because calcium chloride reacts with a compound in concrete called calcium hydroxide

to form another compound called calcium oxychloride.

It's a huge molecule that causes a lot of pressure

inside concrete and starts like degradation of concrete.

The solution, novel blends of concrete that use cheap leftover materials

from the coal and steel industries, stuff like fly ash, silica fume, and slag.

In his latest work, Farnam and his team created plugs of these experimental

concretes and submerged them in salty solutions, along with plugs of conventional

concrete. Then they eavesdropped on any cracking with high sensitivity acoustic sensors and they tracked heat flow through the material too to monitor chemical reactions

The results concrete slugs made with ingredients like fly ash and slag held up remarkably well after more than a month,

whereas normal concrete was cracked to pieces in just a week.

Their recipes are in the journal cement and concrete composites.

Frionnham says some states have actually started using this sort of concrete,

because it's already known to make the material more durable against other factors,

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