Trade Journals for the Concrete Industry

Self-compacting concrete (SCC) emerged on the building scene in the 1980s in Japan together with new types of high performance water reducing admixtures. SCC is simply defined as concrete that is able to compact and flow under its own weight into its final position, while filling the formwork completely and embedding the reinforcement. The concrete should not be subject to vibration and only manual handling is allowed by means of hand tools such as rake and shovel. Therefore, the fresh properties of SCC are significantly different from traditional concrete. The original idea of SCC was to improve the concrete quality by eliminating the effect of vibration that could harm the inner structure of the concrete and to simplify the execution of concreting in order to avoid the need for a highly skilled labour force. For heavily reinforced structures with a complicated geometry it is difficult to perform vibration properly and therefore, SCC has obvious advantages.