Trade Journals for the Concrete Industry

...concrete elements Over the course of the last decades, concrete construction has significantly changed from mass application towards sophisticated more inno- vative, future oriented, and performance based materials technology. Today concrete no longer consists of cement, water, and aggregates, but can be enhanced significantly by using supplementary additions and chemical admixtures. Advancements in admixtures eventually facil- itated the development of new concrete types such as self-compacting concrete (SCC) and high performance concrete (HPC) by uncoupling the workability from the water-cement ratio (w/c). While for traditional concrete types the major mixture parameter for the workability and strength were the w/c and the grading of the aggregates, for SCC and HPC the performance parameters are more complicated and the performance depends highly on the powder components. This makes the system more sophisticated and in parallel more prone to scatter during the production. The complexity and difficulty to predict the effects of changes in the process and mixture makes it very difficult to identify the right potentials for savings.