READY-MIX CONCRETE WITH SPECIAL PROPERTIES
Concrete is the most well-known building material and has been in use for more than 2,000 years. Of course, since its introduction, it has gone through many stages of development, incorporating many diverse types of raw materials, the most common being lime, natural pozzolans, limestone, silica sand and water. Obviously, the developments that revolutionized production and use of concrete were the manufacture of Portland cement and the introduction of steel reinforced concrete at the end of the 19th century.
If you ask someone with no specific knowledge to describe concrete, they will probably talk about a gray material that is very hard and strong. Especially the gray color, coming from the typical color of cement, is considered a trade-mark of concrete, so much so that many people mistakenly use the name “cement” for concrete. But over the years, through the advances in technology and especially the introduction and development of dedicated chemical admixtures, concrete has become something much more elaborate than the strong gray stuff with which we build our homes.
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So, during the last few decades, many different types of concrete have been developed, comprising a big variety of raw materials on top of the usual cement, sand, limestone aggregates and water, the main purpose of which is to give concrete special properties that serve its specific application demands. We now have fiber reinforced concrete, waterproof and pervious concrete, self-compacting and consolidating concrete, lightweight and heavyweight concrete, high early strength and delayed setting concrete, ultra-high-performance concrete, just to name a few. The list is long and keeps expanding thanks to the imagination and ingenuity of manufacturers and engineers worldwide.
In the next series of articles, I will try to share the key principles that need to be taken in consideration when designing different types of ready-mix concrete with special properties. Hopefully, this will help younger and less experienced colleagues, who are currently facing the challenge of designing such products, to meet their goals.