Posted on 04/26/2014 9:53:08 AM PDT by TurboZamboni
new water-repellant concrete impregnated with tiny superstrong fibers promises to leave roads and bridges free of major cracks for up to 120 years.
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee civil engineers have developed a concrete mix that is durable and superhydrophobic. They call it Superhydrophobic Engineered Cementitious Composite (SECC). Preventing normally porous concrete from absorbing water means that liquid can’t get inside, freeze and cause it to crack. The concrete’s unusual characteristics, including being significantly more ductile than traditional concrete, means that cracks that do form do not propagate and cause failure.
“Our architecture allows the material to withstand four times the compression with 200 times the ductility of traditional concrete,” said associate professor Konstantin Sobolev, whose lab created SECC.
(Excerpt) Read more at txchnologist.com ...
The joke going around here is the cops were told to ignore cars veering around on the road. The drunks are driving the cars going straight, oblivious to the strip mines they are running over.
I can hear the union halls crying already...
That is cool. Ductile concrete!
Up in a Northern Twin Cities suburb there’s a street they rebuilt, must be 20 years ago now. I was just noticing the other day it is still pristine.
I don’t know what kind of concrete they used on that but I wish they’d use it everywhere.
Oh, man, I don’t know where you live, but here (Western New York), the roads are an unqualified disaster. They want to blame the winter, but believe me, Buffalo has had a touch of winter over the years. With all the advancement in road technologies over the years, with all the sand they spread instead of plowing, with all the gas taxes, tolls and registration fees, the roads should be like driving on satin by now.
You can definitely tell when you cross into Canada from New York because the roads suddenly improve.
Wonder if any scientific entity has ever done an in-depth analysis of the concrete used to build the Pantheon in Rome...I hear it has held up for a pretty good stretch of time.
“Superhydrophobic”? Please don’t give the liberals another term they can use to bash us people who don’t like getting wet over the head with.
Oh yeah. BIG time. Still haven’t quite figured out the Roman’s secret yet. (Although volcanic ash and mild climate seem to be factors.)
It’s Superhydrophobeagilisticexpialidocious!
Awful here too. With that one exception.
Stories come up from time to time about someone rediscovering the Roman formula.
Key issue: failure mode
Small fiber reinforcing has been done before, and is attractive because you can add it to the mix, and don’t need to place it beforehand.
The problem is that when small-fiber-crete fails, it tends to fail suddenly and catastrophically. Monolithic Domes(TM), for example, are no longer shotcreted that way for that reason. Rebar provides warning, and (usually) more gradual failure.
Indeed, I see no reason why this new formulation can’t be used with traditional, coated or stainless rebar for a lifetime of Roman proportions.
Better road-building methods are out there. Roads with planned obsolescence offer politicians more frequent opportunities to accept bribes, so short term surfacing like blacktop is the norm.
Who can live on bribes only offered every hundred years?
This could be a great thing. I don’t even think this will kill the companies the do roads, because if we aren’t spending money rebuilding the roads we already have, we will spend it making more roads or widening the current roads.
There is no end of the need for roads, only a limit to how much money we can spend on them.
It would be interesting to know if it was an experiment. The other possibility is that the concrete work was done correctly. A lot of concrete is not.
Actually I think even these engineers are misunderstanding their own term. “Phobic” means fearful, not against or opposed to. But the liberals have popularized it to mean “hate”, having themselves lost most of their brain power due to drugs and otherwise questionable behavior.
I noticed when they were repaving a section of freeway near her that they use almost no rebar anymore. Just a little strip at the joints.
romans didn’t have 20 ton double-length semis driving on them all day and night. didn’t have a lot of the winters we get here in certain places either.
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