Who will be making high performance concrete?

Author(s): Michael Khrapko
Paper category: Conference
Book title: Concrete Repair, Rehabilitation and Retrofitting III (ICCRRR)
Editor(s): M.G. Alexander, H.-D. Beushausen, F. Dehn, P. Moyo
Print ISBN: 978-0-415-89952-9
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Pages: 530- 531
Total Pages: 2
Language: English

Abstract: 
There is an increasing demand for high performance concrete all around the world. Selfcompacting concrete is growing in popularity, especially in precast factories; ultra high strength concrete attracts the interest of architects and designers, other high performance cement-based materials such as strain hardening composites, textile reinforced concrete and others are gaining their acceptance in the structural repairs and new product development sectors. Production and supply of high performance concrete is very technologically specific as it is highly sensitive to external influences, such as quality and uniformity of raw materials, batching (weighing) accuracy, mixing, personnel qualifications and capabilities, formwork quality, and many others.
The main medium for production and delivery of concrete in mass volumes these days is readymix (or pre-mixed) concrete, which originated in the 1920–30s. Concrete mixing technological advances enable to manufacture concrete even quicker and of better quality and uniformity, but the main objective of any Readymix (RMC) organization the fast production of a large volume of concrete—hasn’t changed. RMC plants achieve this goal through the production of plain concrete.
Self-Compacting Concrete (SCC) is one of the most used types of high performance concretes. Despite the intensive effort of commercializing Self-Compacting Concrete (SCC) in concrete construction industry in the last 15 years, globally SCC makes up approximately only 7% of total concrete produced (this excludes precast concrete). One the main reasons for this is that RMC industry, by the nature of the business organization, does not have enough incentive to be attracted to supply High Performance Concrete, as requirements for HPC production go beyond the routine daily operation. This paper discusses the problem in more detail and looks at whether the RMC industry can become the prime vehicle for the manufacture and delivery of high performance concrete.
The purpose of this paper is to simply bring up an awareness of the potential issues and in no way to criticize ready mix concrete and concrete construction industries.

Online publication: 2014
Publication Type: abstract_only
Public price (Euros): 0.00