Home Improvement Tips
Common Types of Concrete You Should Know About

Common Types of Concrete You Should Know About

Concrete is the most widely used construction material on the planet, outselling the next two materials combined (when considering tonnage). Even though you might believe that dealing with concrete is as easy as backing up one of those common trucks and pouring the cement, there is a significant amount of engineering, preparation, and testing that occurs until the concrete is uniformly mixed.

Do you realize how many reinforced steel bars go into paving a driveway, patio, or skyrise apartment house, for instance? That the amount of fine aggregate in a mixture will alter the difficulty of a pour? That the very air we breathe has the potential to be more damaging to concrete than many tons of pressure from above?

Concrete is far more than just a substance on which you can write your name until it hardens. Even though the final product appears to be somewhat similar, there are many forms of concrete. Let’s take a good look at the most popular forms of concrete and their applications:

  • Lightweight Concrete
  • Reinforced Concrete
  • Precast Concrete
  • High-Strength Concrete
  • High-Performance Concrete

Lightweight Concrete

This concrete is much less structural and more included in insulation for metal construction materials or as non-loading supporting concrete walls since it is made from pumice stone rather than the normal stone or rock composite. Furthermore, lightweight concrete is being used as protection for water pipes inside the plant and as a form of fire-proofing.

Reinforced Concrete

Reinforced concrete, as the name implies, is used in combination with fibres, bars, or other products to increase the tensile strength of the concrete. These components, most generally rebar, are more malleable than concrete and pass those properties to the structure as a whole. Reinforcement is used in the majority of concrete applications.

Precast Concrete

This applies to how the concrete parts are made rather than the composition of the concrete. Concrete is often poured into shapes on the work site and left to cure for days or even weeks. Since precast concrete is manufactured in a contained way, the goods can be manufactured well ahead of time, strength tested, and supplied on the day they are needed. This is a much more effective process. Check out Robson Concreting for more information.

High-Density Concrete

This form of concrete is used when the contents of a concrete building, such as a nuclear power station, must be extra safe. Heavy aggregates, as opposed to standard aggregates, are made of iron or barytes. This concrete can be slightly thinner than reinforced or plain concrete.

Whatever type of concrete is used, there are a few items that they both have in common or should be recognized. To follow regional and local codes, for instance, any form of job necessitates concrete with some tensile strength. Other normal operating procedures include compacting concrete to extract air from the concrete mix or allowing the material to harden enough.

Other considerations must be made when deciding on the type of concrete to be used for a specific project. Type I cement concrete is the most popular. If medium sulphate levels are found in the water or soil, type II cement is used. Type III has higher early strength due to a finer mixture, but it lacks the overall strength of Type I.

Tags :

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *