Concrete is a versatile, durable, sustainable, economical material, and world?s most widely used construction material. The proportion of concrete ingredients should accurately measure to make the excellent quality of concrete. One can accurately measure the concrete ingredients by carrying out the batching process.
- Batching is the process where the quantity or material proportions like cement, aggregates, water, etc. Those are measured based on either weight or volume to prepare the concrete mix.
- Proper Batching improves the workability of concrete by reducing the segregation or bleeding in concrete. It helps to get a smooth surface of the concrete. It also increases the construction speed and minimizes the wastage of concrete ingredients. Hence, batching of concrete is an essential process while making concrete.
- To form durable, sustainable, and economical concrete, one should have carried out the concrete mix design (CMD). The scientific and systematic process of choosing an economically relative proportion of various ingredients from the available material give cohesive concrete of the desired workability at the new stage with desired strength and durability in the hardened stages is known as Concrete mix design (CMD).
- Once concrete mix design carries out, the first task is batching concrete materials like cement, aggregates, admixture, etc. The concrete batching happened by measuring and combining required concrete ingredients either by weight or volume as per the mix design.
- Once materials batch, they are introduced into a concrete mixture to produce a uniform and homogeneous concrete mix. In the concrete mixer machine, cement, aggregates (sand or gravel), and water is added to form the concrete. The mixer machine not only achieves the concretes mix uniformity but also discharges it without disturbing that uniformity. The mechanism that mixes concrete knows the ?mechanical concrete mixer? or simply concrete mixer.
There are three batching modes of concrete ingredients. They are as follows:
- Random volumetric batching is a batching process that cannot control the proportion of concrete ingredients like cement, aggregates, water, etc. It results in errors, and ultimately, the concrete may not achieves its designed strength.
- In random volumetric batching, the proportion of concrete ingredients cannot control due to the size and shape of containers. This practice is unscientific, crude and should never be allowed even for a small job.
Volumetric batching of concrete does by using measurement boxes, locally known as ?farmas? or gauge boxes. In an ideal case, the volume of the farma is made equal to the weight of one bag of cement, 35 liters, or multiple thereof.
Concrete ingredients like fine aggregates (sand), 10 mm Coarse aggregates, or 40mm Coarse aggregates (Kapachi) are measuring by farmas or gauge boxes that the farmas or gauge boxes are perfectly filled. In volumetric batching, water is measured either in Kg or liters. The water meter uses to measure the water quantity while batching or use cans of water having a fixed volume.
