Self-Consolidating Concrete Robustness in Continuous Production Regarding Fresh and Hardened State Properties

摘要

The number of applications where self-consolidating concrete (SCC) is used is rising considerably worldwide because of its advantages over conventional concrete. Large-scale SCC production with good degrees of reliability has encouraged engineers to further study the stability of different SCC mixture designs in terms of robustness.rnThe robustness of a SCC mixture is the stability of its properties when the original mixture design is affected by errors in weighing the constituents. To evaluate the robustness of SCC, six different SCC mixture designs were selected. Variations were applied to them, simulating large-scale production errors, and their properties in fresh and hardened states were evaluated. The influence of such errors on concrete properties was analyzed by means of analysis of variance. In addition, tolerances generally accepted by codes were compared to statistical distributions of errors obtained from real data provided by several Spanish concrete producers.rnIn general, tolerances for traditional concrete have, proved to be valid for SCC as well. Errors in weighing water and fines contents are of capital importance and are admissible up to ±6%.