Ingenieurwissenschaften und zugeordnete Tätigkeiten
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Admixtures are important constituents to enhance the performance of concrete. They allow for more efficient use of binders which can mitigate negative environmental impacts from producing cement-based materials. Commonly used rheology modifying agents like polycarboxylate ethers or cellulose ethers are synthetic or semi-synthetic, respectively. This requires additional energy consumption for their production and global supply chains particularly for many developing regions, which will be large consumers of concrete in the future. However, many locally available bio-based polysaccharides could be effectively used instead. These polymers are often overlooked by engineers and scientists due to their limited distribution and inherent complexity, yet they represent an underleveraged source of precursors for admixtures. This study investigates the action mechanisms of some bio-based rheology modifying agents, i.e., acacia gum and miscanthus gum, and provides a comparison to a conventionally modified starch. The results show that the mechanism of action of these polymers is closely related to the composition of the mixture, mixing regime, and the composition of the aqueous phase. Depending on the agent, either plasticizing or stabilizing effects on rheology can be revealed.
Chemical admixtures like superplasticizers or stabilizing agents are of ever increasing importance for modern concrete technology. Although such admixtures have meanwhile become common practice in many applications of concrete technology, the understanding of these highly complex systems is still limited and the relevant parameters, which predominantly control the interaction between the superplasticizer and the cement components, have not been identified yet.
Optical methods have been successfully used for the analysis and monitoring of the interactions between a broad variety of nanoscale and molecular systems like nanoparticles of various chemical composition and different types of organic ligands or biomolecules. This encouraged us to assess the potential of these methods, and particularly reflectance and fluorescence measurements, for the study of the interactions that occur at the interface between particle or hydrate surfaces and the fluid phase at a very early stage of concrete formation. Special emphasis is dedicated to search for and identify differences between commonly used superplasticizers.
Here, we focus on hydration effects using commercial comb shape polycarboxylate ethers (PCEs) with different charge densities, which are known to allow a very low water/cement ratio (w/c of 0.20 or less) while maintaining good workability. Based upon changes of the intensity of the reflectance and fluorescence signal and spectral effects of a dye, acting as optical reporter, a model for the interactions of dye, PCE molecules and cement nanoparticles in the very first phase of cement hydration is derived
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.
Concrete of today has only little in common with the traditional concrete used a few decades ago. It has become a high performance material, which can be adjusted for high performance applications and according to ultimate user specifications. The reason for the rapid evolvement was the increasing awareness about how the rheology of concrete can be improved without negatively affecting the mechanical properties of concrete by chemical admixtures.