What Is Concrete?
As industry folks, we get asked this question a lot: What is concrete?
Anyway, we thought of discussing this as part of boosting our ‘The Knowledge’ section, which sadly has been neglected of late.
Answers.com says:
Okay, let’s forget about the textbook definition, for a moment, they tend to be skewered towards American industry standards. Concrete like any other building material, differs from one region to another, even they sometimes use the same code of practice.
Concrete is the primary building material for most kinds of structural element, especially for homes in Malaysia (which is property or real estate, which is how it is related to this blog). Yep, concrete is often used to steel bars, timber, structural steel form the ‘structural’ part of your house, and bricks, aluminium, glass, mortar, plaster and other fittings make the architectural portion of it. Let’s not go into the electrical and mechanical portion of your house for today.
Right, so what’s concrete? It’s made out of 4 important component – cement, water, aggregate, and additives.
Cement – the more base material used for concocting stuff like concrete, plaster, mortar, screeding, etc. in Malaysia, we usually use OPC (Ordinary Portland Cement, don’t ask why). There are many other types, let’s not get into it. In context of concrete, cement is sometimes referred to as the binder material.
Water – H2O. Comes from Malaysian taps.
Aggregates – Around here, we usually use 20-25mm size aggregates, mostly grayish white stones with streaks of black and shiny. Expensive stuff. Aggregates give concrete the strength and volume.
Additives – Local suppliers add loads of chemicals into concrete for a variety of reasons – to make it more workable, to make it harden slower, to make it a different colour, to make it smell like strawberries, etc.
Basically when cement is mixed with the water (not necessarily from Malaysian taps only), a chemical reaction takes place, and lots of heat is released. Long story, we won’t go into it. Anyway, in the old days, concrete is measured in ratio form like 1:2:4 and 1:3:6, and it was mixed manually (with wooden crates and that small concrete mixer). Nowadays, we use the grade of concrete (G30, P45) and concrete come in huge concrete trucks from the batching plant.
And never follow too close to those trucks. And don’t get me started on concrete testing either.
