The WSU Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering recently selected Jialuo He as the recipient of John Roberson Outstanding Dissertation Award. The title of his PhD dissertation is, “Development, Characterization and Modeling of Self-Healing Cementitious Materials.” Self-healing technology holds great promise in benefiting the durability and resilience of concrete infrastructure. While various external self-healing systems can improve the post-cracking recovery of mechanical properties of cementitious materials, few studies have explored their implications on concrete durability. Dr. He’s research responds to this critical gap by developing and investigating two external self-healing systems.

Dr. He’s dissertation demonstrates the great potential of self-healing technology in enabling concrete infrastructure with extended service life, which serves the interest of this nation. For instance, his study revealed that the self-healing system consisting of urea-formaldehyde microcapsules (containing calcium nitrite as the healant) and PVA microfibers could effectively reduce about 20-25% of the total shrinkage, 15-20% of the chloride migration coefficient, and 40-65% of the gas permeability of cementitious composite. Such a self-healing concrete could survive over 700 rapid freeze-thaw cycles, whereas the regular concrete counterpart could barely survive 60 cycles.

Jialuo He began his PhD program at Washington State University in August 2015. He has published nine academic papers in top-tier, peer-reviewed journals. In addition to his PhD research, Jialuo completed a two-year project that evaluated the performance of discrete sacrificial anodes in protecting steel rebar in salt-contaminated concrete, for which he was awarded the Simpson Strong-Tie Corrosion Research Scholarship. He also received the Richard Perteet Graduate Fellowship in Civil Engineering in 2017 and 2018. Congratulations Dr. He!