Wednesday, April 22, 2020

HISTORY OF CONCRETE


HISTORY OF CONCRETE

                                                           Fig: Portland cement

The time period during which concrete was first invented depends on how one interprets the term “concrete.”  Ancient materials were crude cements made by crushing and burning gypsum or limestone. Lime also refers to crushed, burned limestone. When sand and water were added to these cements, they became mortar, which was a plaster-like material used to adhere stones to each other.  Over thousands of years, these materials were improved upon, combined with other materials and, ultimately, morphed into modern concrete. Today’s concrete is made using Portland cement, coarse and fine aggregates of stone and sand, and water.  Admixtures are chemicals added to the concrete mix to control its setting properties and are used primarily when placing concrete during environmental extremes, such as high or low temperatures, windy conditions, etc. The precursor to concrete was invented in about 1300 BC when Middle Eastern builders found that when they coated the outsides of their pounded-clay fortresses and home walls with a thin, damp coating of burned limestone, it reacted chemically with gases in the air to form a hard, protective surface. This wasn’t concrete, but it was the beginning of the development of cement.
                                     Fig:  History of concrete

Early composite materials typically included mortar-crushed, burned limestone, sand and water, which was used for building with stone, as opposed to casting the material in a mold, which is essentially how modern concrete is used, with the mold being the concrete forms. As one of the key constituents of modern concrete, cement has been around for a long time. About 12 million years ago in what is now Israel, natural deposits were formed by reactions between limestone and oil shale that were produced by spontaneous combustion. However, cement is not concrete. Concrete is a composite building material and the ingredients, of which cement is just one, have changed over time and are changing even now. The performance characteristics can change according to the different forces that the concrete will need to resist. These forces may be gradual or intense, they may come from above (gravity), below (soil heaving), the sides (lateral loads), or they might take the form of erosion, abrasion or chemical attack. The ingredients of concrete and their proportions are called the design mix.

HISTORY OF STEEL FIBER REINFORCED CONCRETE
A French gardener by name Joseph Monier first invented the reinforced concrete in the year 1849. If not for this reinforced concrete most of the modern buildings would not have been standing today. Reinforced concrete can be used to produce frames, columns, foundation, beams etc. Reinforcement material used should have excellent bonding characteristic, high tensile strength and good thermal compatibility. Reinforcement requires that there shall be smooth transmission of load from the concrete to the interface between concrete and reinforcement material and then on to reinforcement material. Thus the concrete and the material reinforced shall have the same strain.

                                                                                      Fig:  Steel Fiber reinforced concrete

The steel bars are reinforced into the concrete. The bars have a rough, corrugated surface thus allowing better bonding with steel rebar’s the concrete gets extra tensile strength. The compression strength, bending also shown marked improvement thermal expansion characteristic of steel rebar’s and concrete shall match. The rebar shall have cross sectional are equal to 1% for slabs and beams, this can be 6% in case of columns. The concrete has alkaline nature, this forms a passivating film around the bars thereby protecting it from corrosion. This passivating film will not form neutral or acidic condition. Carbonation of concrete takes place along with chloride absorption resulting in failure of steel rebar. By comparing the tension capacity of steel bars and concrete + steel reinforcements the reinforced concrete can be called as under reinforced (tensile capacity of bars in less than concrete + bar) it is over reinforced (tensile capacity of steel is greater than concrete + steel tensile strength. The over reinforced fails without giving prior warning and under reinforced fails but gives a deformation warning before it fails. Therefore it is better to consider an under reinforced concrete. The long process of inventing modern steel fiber reinforced concrete started in 1874, when A. Bernard, in California, patented the idea of strengthening concrete with the help of the addition of steel splinters (Maidl 1995). Another 36 years passed before Porter in 1910 mentioned the possibility of applying short wire to concrete. This was supposed to improve homogeneity of concrete reinforced by thick wire. In 1918, in France, H. Alfsen patented a method of modifying concrete by long steel fibers, long wooden fibers, and fibers made of other materials. According to him, the addition of such fibers was to increase tensile strength of concrete (Maidl 1995). Alfsen was the first to mention the influence of coarseness of the surface of fibers onto their adhesiveness to matrix, and it was also he who paid special attention to the problem of anchorage of fibers. After these first patents, there were numerous others, but generally they concerned different shapes and probable applications of readymade SFRC.

                                                                                                       Fig:  Concreting

For instance, the patent from 1927 worked out in California by G.C. Martin, regarded the production of SFRC pipes. In 1938, N. Zitkewic patented a way to increase the strength and impact resistance of concrete by adding cut pieces of steel wire (Jamrozy 1985). Steel fibers, patented in 1943 by G. Constancinesco, were already very similar to the ones used at present. The patent, apart from different shapes of fibers, contained information about the kind and dispersion of cracks during loading of SFRC elements and it made mentioned of the great amount of energy which is absorbed by SFRC under impact. The largest number of patents concerning the use of steel fibers to modify concrete have been submitted in the USA, France, and Germany in the years following. Wide applications of fiber reinforced composites in civil engineering were limited for a long time by lack of reliable methods of examination and mainly by the sudden progress of traditional rod reinforcement.  Concrete is most widely used construction material in the world due to its ability to get cast in any form and shape. It also replaces old construction materials such as brick and stone masonry. The strength and durability of concrete can be changed by making appropriate changes in its ingredients like cemetitious material, aggregate and water and by adding some special ingredients. Hence concrete is very well suitable for a wide range of applications. However concrete has some deficiencies as listed below:
1) Low tensile strength
2) Low post cracking capacity
3) Brittleness and low ductility
4) Limited fatigue life
5) Incapable of accommodating large deformations
6) Low impact strength
The presence of micro cracks in the mortar-aggregate interface is responsible for the inherent weakness of plain concrete. The weakness can be removed by inclusion of fibers in the mixture. Different types of fibers, such as those used in traditional composite materials can be introduced into the concrete mixture to increase its toughness, or ability to resist crack growth. The fibers help to transfer loads at the internal micro cracks. Such a concrete is called fiber-reinforced concrete (FRC). The concept of using fibers in order to reinforce matrices weak in tension is more than 4500 years old.



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