Properties of Self-compacting Concrete – an Overview

Self-compacting concrete can be defined as the concrete which requires no vibrations and can flow around obstructions, encloses the reinforcement and fills up the formwork completely under its self weight. Over the last ten years, significant amount of work has been carried out on self-compacting concrete all over the world. In countries like Japan, Sweden, Thailand, UK etc., the knowledge of SCC has moved from domain of research to application. The paper discusses the existing level of research about various aspects of selfcompacting concrete, including materials and mixture design, test methods such as Vfunnel test, L-Box test, J-ring etc., construction-related issues like Tribological behavior of SCC, performance of SCC for under water applications , in basement walls, columns, beams etc., and properties including fresh concrete properties like slump flow, segregation resistance, compressive strength, permeability and diffusivity. Durability properties like sulfate resistance, internal frost resistance, resistance to freezing and thawing, deicing salt surface scaling resistance. It also provides insight into the research being carried out to predict the performance of SCC mixtures using modeling techniques like factorial design method and artificial neural network. The models developed can be used as economical tools for optimized design of SCC mixtures thereby reducing number of mix trials and can be used to generate future results using other materials.