CONCRETE: HARD FACTS.

DURABLE STRUCTURES PART TWO Page 1 of 5

September 2002
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Science Making concrete is much more than just mixing cement, water and earth
Science according to Public science communicator, Dr Sirion Roberston. After
Granny some curing of the concrete in PART ONE of this series on the chemistry of
Organisations
cement, he brings PART TWO on the science of making concrete. A must
for anyone who has ever had to build or will be building with cement. Don't
hear it from the builder - get it from the scientists! Science for the DIY
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About us As we've said, the chemically active component of concrete is the cement,
and this is where the strength comes from. The word "cement" refers, in
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its widest sense, to anything that holds materials together. Glues are
Feedback "cements". The particular type of cement used in concrete, and nearly all
Contact us building work, is called "hydraulic cement" because water is required for
the chemical reactions that lead to hardening. There are several types of
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hydraulic cement, but the most important and commonly-used is "portland
Search cement", so-called because its colour, when set, resembles that of a type
Archives of stone found on the Isle of Portland, in the English Channel.

Portland cement is made by crushing, heating, and crushing again a

mixture of rocks and soil-like substances, the main ones being types of
limestone, chalk and clay. These are complex substances, in the sense that
they contain several chemical elements in various combinations. The most
important actual chemicals are calcium, silica, aluminium, iron and oxygen.
The purpose of the first crushing and grinding is to bring the chemicals into
sufficiently close proximity to enable them to react with each other.
Heating, to about 1 500 degrees C, provides the necessary energy for
these reactions to occur, and new compounds are formed. The final
grinding again produces an extremely fine powder and close proximity of
potentially reactive substances. When water is added, new compounds are
formed, some contraction in volume occurs, heat is given off, and the
individual cement particles fuse into a continuous "matrix" which locks the
sand and stone components into a hard, rigid mass.

Although modern cements are made in factories under carefully controlled

conditions, there are also so-called "natural cements" in many areas of the
world. It was these "natural cements" that our forebears used in Rome,
Greece and elsewhere. The most common are mixtures of limestone and

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clays. They are prepared by burning and then crushing into powdered
form.

Attaining strength - and measuring it

The graph to the right

shows increasing strength of
a sample of concrete as a
function of curing time.
Notice that strengthening is
quite rapid at first: the
strength after one week is
more than half that attained
at the end of four weeks.
Also, although the graph
doesn't continue beyond 28
days, the shape of the curve
makes it quite clear that
strength continues to
increase well beyond a
month. Indeed tests show that, under favourable conditions, concrete is
still "maturing" after 18 months! ("Favourable" here means under warm
and humid conditions.)

The strength unit on the graph is MegaPascals. The Pascal is the basic unit
of pressure, and pressure is defined as force per unit area. The details on
the graph were obtained empirically - in other words, from experiments. In
this case the experiment involves using a hydraulic press to crush
specimen cubes of the concrete, and measuring the pressure at which the
cube breaks.

The test we've shown in the graph is for "compressive strength". Another
sort of test is for "tensile strength". You can best visualise this by
imagining a vertical rod of concrete, with a mass suspended from it. Here
the force tends to pull the substance apart, rather than crushing the
components closer together. As we increase the hanging mass, the rod will
eventually break, and the force that finally breaks it will be a measure of
the material's tensile strength.

The main "Achilles heel" of concrete is

its relatively low tensile strength: only
about one tenth of its compressive
strength. This has important
implications for concrete as a mass-
bearing structure. Any horizontal beam,
supported at both ends, will tend to sag
under its own weight. With additional
loading it will eventually break. Notice
the image to the right, that there are
both compressive and tensile stresses
acting in the beam.

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The tensile force acts along the lower part, where the beam tends to
stretch. And if tensile strength is less than compressive strength, this is
where it will eventually break. Because of their low tensile strength,
concrete beams and slabs aren't good at carrying heavy loads unless
they're "helped".

Reinforced concrete: Steel to the rescue

Incorporating steel into concrete produces a composite building material

sometimes called "ferrocrete". (It is this material, or the related
"ferrocement" that is used for boat-building.) In spite of the fact that
concrete has been used since the earliest civilisations, ferrocrete dates
from as recently as the mid-nineteenth century. With the great increase in
strength that it gives, its effect on architectural styles and potentialities
has been enormous.

Steel is the ideal material to embed in concrete as a strengthening agent,

mainly for three reasons. Firstly, steel has extremely high tensile strength;
secondly, by a fortunate coincidence, the extent to which steel and
concrete change their dimensions in response to temperature change (that
is, their coefficients of expansion) are very similar. Thus even with very
great temperature changes, the concrete and the embedded steel more or
less keep pace with each other in their responses, and no severe stresses
are set up by one material "trying" to change its length more than the
other. The third thing that makes steel so appropriate is that - perhaps
surprisingly - its elasticity is less than that of concrete. When a concrete
beam or slab bends (See the image above), the material on the outer part
of the curve stretches. Due to its elasticity, a small amount of stretching
can safely occur without breaking the concrete, and it is this very small
amount of bending that puts the steel rods under tension - the concrete
"tries" to stretch them. The fact that steel has a very much smaller
tendency to stretch, under a given force, allows it to come to the rescue
and prevent any further deformation of the concrete member.

(The tendency of concrete to contract slightly while curing is in one way an

advantage. This "shrinkage" causes the concrete to grip very tightly onto
the steel. As a precaution, to ensure that the concrete-steel interface
doesn't break down under load, the steel members are usually bent in
various ways to give even more effective bonding.)

From the foregoing you can see that it's

extremely important where, in the concrete
beam or slab, the steel reinforcing rods are
placed. To put the steel near the top of the
beam in Figure 2 would be a complete waste.
The resulting structure would be no stronger
than competely unreinforced concrete. Where
would you place the reinforcing rods in the beam
shown in the image to the right.

The amount, type and positioning of steel in reinforced concrete is

calculated very carefully by structural engineers, taking into account the
relative tensile strengths and elasticities of the two materials, so that the
resulting structure will carry any loads that might be placed on it - with a

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good safety margin. The size of the "safety margin" built into the design
depends on what the engineers see as a "worst case scenario".

The main weakness of steel, as a structural material, is its tendency to

corrode. Concrete, on the other hand, is highly resistant to corrosion, and
therefore makes an excellent shield for the embedded steel. It's important
that no steel members come closer than about 5cm from the surface of the
concrete, and that the concrete itself is of low permeability. If cracks or
incorrect building procedures do allow the reinforcing steel to corrode, it
slowly expands and may eventually cause parts of the surrounding
concrete surface layers to break off. The condition is known as "spalling".
It's clearly a progressive and potentially dangerous situation, and requires
careful attention.

A Final Miscellany: Accelerating; Retarding; Air entrainment;

Colouring.

We've covered what are certainly the most important and perhaps the
most interesting aspects of concrete technology. Here are some closing
remarks on other aspects of this extraordinarily versatile medium.

Accelerating of the curing process is achieved either by raising the

temperature, as we've discussed, or by adding substances during the
mixing. Calcium chloride or sodium chloride are the most commonly-used
accelerators. It's inappropriate for large quantities which must be
processed at a single session, because hardening shouldn't begin while
work is still in progress. The final strength of rapidly-cured concrete is
usually a little less than equivalent mixes which haven't been accelerated.

Retarding is achieved by adding calcium sulphate, sodium bicarbonate, or

various other organic compounds.

Air-entrainment is important because this type of concrete, in addition to

being somewhat lighter, is considerably more resistant to damage by very
low temperatures. Regular freezing and thawing of concrete can lead to
severe deterioration. The air-entrained variety is also a very much better
insulator against temperature change. Air entrainment is achieved by
mixing in, with the cement, a compound that react with the cement and
water to produce small bubbles. Animal fats, or various fatty acids are
amongst the substances used to cause bubble formation.

Colouring is done by mixing one or more of several coloured oxides into

the newly-mixed concrete. This adds quite significantly to the cost of the
project, and where appropriate it is more common to "float" the pigment
onto the surface of the wet concrete immediately after placing, so that
only the top few millimetres are pigmented. The colouring is more effective
if the concrete is made with a white or nearly-white variety of cement
instead of the ordinary grey stuff. This too adds substantially to the cost.

Concluding remarks

Concrete remains one of the most commonly-used, durable and versatile

structural materials: a direct descendant of the stone age, that has kept

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pace with our most modern and pressing needs.

There is good reason to believe that if life exists elsewhere in the cosmos,
it is based on carbon compounds. For similarly fundamental reasons we
may assume that advanced life-forms elsewhere would have discovered,
and used, cement-like substances - including concrete.

As we said: fascinating stuff.

For Part One of this Article:

Science in Africa - Africa's First On-Line Science Magazine

Copyright 2002, Janice Limson. All Rights Reserved

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