Ingenieurwissenschaften und zugeordnete Tätigkeiten
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- 2016 (3)
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- Englisch (3)
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- Self-compacting concrete (3) (entfernen)
Numerical simulations of concrete castings are complex and time consuming. In order to decrease simulation time and to simplify simulation procedure, an innovative modelling approach, which treats reinforced sections in a formwork as porous media, was proposed. In the previous studies, this numerical model was proved suitable to simulate casting of model yield-stress fluids through reinforced elements. This article focuses on the experimental validation of the proposed model at the concrete scale. For this purpose, a large-scale laboratory casting of a highly reinforced beam is performed. The casting process is numerically simulated and the numerical results are compared to the experimental measurements.
Over the course of the last decades, concrete construction has significantly changed from mass application towards sophisticated more innovative, 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 facilitated 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.
Chemical admixtures like superplasticisers or stabilising agents are of ever increasing importance for modern concrete technology. They liberate the workability of concrete from its dependency on water content, and thus, open the gate towards innovative and future oriented concrete technologies such as self-compacting concrete.
Today, admixture addition has become common practice in concrete technology, but the understanding of their highly complex mode of operation is extremely difficult and demands for understanding of processes within the range between nanometres and centimetres.
Due to its complex time-dependent, multi-phase and multi-scale behaviour, flowable concrete systems are highly complicated and cannot be described comprehensively by simple models. It is therefore extremely challenging to identify the relevant parameters that predominantly control flow phenomena on different size scales, since these may occur on any scale between the nano scale (e.g. superplasticizer adsorption) and macro scale (e.g. grading of the aggregates). The present study discusses fundamental mechanisms at the interface between particle or hydrate surfaces and the fluid phase at a very early stage of concrete formation, and links these effects to macroscopic flow phenomena. Methods are discussed that appear promising interdisciplinary tools for enhancement of the understanding of the relevant interactions that are responsible for the macroscopic flow of flowable concrete.