Concrete Pixels

Most of the construction projects big or small are estimating the in-place compressive strength of the newly cast structures using the cubes or cylinder specimens taken at the time of casting. It is “widely believed” that the specimens taken on the same casting have the same strength as the structure cast. This is extremely important [...]

Concrete when produced requires a certain measure of what we call workability. Until today I doubt if there is really a general agreement on the definition of workability. This is the reason why there are so many methods in measuring it like the slump, flow, vebee, compaction index, etc. Despite it’s many limitation, the slump [...]

As I am involved in the splitting tensile strength of concrete in our project, the construction of OL3 Nuclear Power Plant, I have made some research on this subject. There have been so many studies/models made to date inorder to estimate the splitting tensile strength of normal weight concrete from higly respected institutes like ACI,CEB-FIP [...]

I’m so glad to be a part of this international concrete expert team for the pioneering generation III+ nuclear power plant project in Olkiluoto, Finland known as the OL3 Project. It is called OL3 being the 3rd Nuclear Power Plant in this island (Olkiluoto). Our team is composed of Dr. Bernd Schnuetgen from Germany. He [...]

Construction nowadays uses different types of “cosmetics” in producing concrete inorder to achieve concrete properties that the situation demands. These cosmetics that I am refering to are commonly called admixtures. Admixtures are actually materials other than cement or aggregate or water that are added during the production of concrete i.e. before or after mixing. Though [...]

About 70% of concrete volume is made up of aggreggates of various sizes from less than 1 mm up to 64mm or even more although in normal construction a maximum size of 20-32mm is used. One of the most important consideration when combining different sizes of aggregates is the distribution on how much of each [...]

Concreting in one go of high walls, big columns (one meter or more in height) or other similar structures is often done in layers of less than half a meter. In pouring such structures it is very important to ensure that before pouring the next layer the elder layer should still be in its vibratable [...]

For more than 15 years of my career in construction, I have only known the heavyweight concrete from the literatures such as textbooks, publications, etc. But now I have a close encounter with this concrete as I was involved in the design and testing of such type of concrete for our project. This concrete is [...]

In the concrete world, we have a very special type of concrete called the “the redeemer or sacrificial concrete”. This concrete is indeed special as it has an exceptional purpose in the new designs of nuclear power plants. It is very useful in case of core melting, one of the possible failure of a nuclear [...]

I did not appreciate nuclear energy until I came to work in Finland for the ongoing construction of the first of its kind so called generation 3+ pressurized water reactor originally named as European Pressurized Reactor but has now gained the name internationally as Evolutionary Power Reactor or simply EPR.
With the skyrocketing prices of fuels [...]