Trade Journals for the Concrete Industry

The discussion about the quality of wet and dry mixing processes is going on in many countries of the world for years, mostly with a more emotional than a technical background. Therefore, a number of leading companies who are supplying concrete mixers to the industry realized the need for an independent research study. These companies (IME, IMER, OMG-SICOMA) are supplying concrete mixers of different type: Twin shaft mixers and planetary mixers. As a neutral research institute, the Italian Concrete Institute was asked to provide services and to effect tests in order to fulfil a comparative research on the characteristics of concretes, produced using a dry mix process and a wet mix process. The research is meant to identify possible quality differences between the concrete produced using a stationary concrete mixer (wet mix process) and concrete produced by direct loading of the components into a truck mixer (dry mix process). This article is a summary of the complete research study carried out by the Italian Concrete Institute [1].