Part I of this three-part paper describes the various steps that led to the development of a class of high performance short steel fibre-reinforced cementitious composites (HPFRCCs) which has been patented under the trade name CARDIFRC1. This class of materials generally contains no coarse aggregates and is characterised by high tensile/ flexural strength and high toughness. A method is propose...

Concrete is very sensitive to crack formation. As wide cracks endanger the durability, repair may be required. However, these repair works raise the life-cycle cost of concrete as they are labor intensive and because the structure becomes in disuse during repair. In 1994, C. Dry was the first who proposed the intentional introduction of self-healing properties in concrete. In the following year...

The use of Engineered Cementitious Composites (ECC) for structural design requires a number of assumptions of the material, some of which can be drastically different from those suitable for normal concrete and tension-softening fiber reinforced concrete. This contribution focuses on design assumptions of the constitutive models of ECC in tension and compression. Specifically, while the tensile...

Pumpable roof supports are currently being used to provide a safe working environment for longwall mining. Because different pumpable supports are visually similar and installed fundamentally in the same manner as other supports, there is a tendency to believe they all perform the same way. However, there are several design parameters that can affect their performance, including the cementitiou...

The recovery behavior for strength and impermeability of cementitious composites embedded with organic microcapsules was investigated in this study. Mortar specimens were formed by mixing the organic microcapsules and a catalyst with cement and sand. The mechanical behaviors of flexural and compression strength were tested. The results showed that strength could increase by up to nine percent w...

High performance concrete (HPC) requires a low water-to-cementitious materials mass ratio (w/cm), often with the inclusion of supplemental cementitious materials such as silica fume in the mixture, thus necessitating the use of a superplasticizer. Because of the low w/cm and rapid reaction at early ages, proper curing from the earliest time possible is very essential in HPC. Internal curing has...

Biogenic self-healing cementitious materials target on the closure of micro-cracks with precipitated inorganic minerals originating from bacterial metabolic activity. Dormant bacterial spores and organic mineral compounds often constitute a biogenic healing agent. The current paper focuses on the investigation of the most appropriate organic carbon source to be used as component of a biogenic h...

A set-up especially designed for semi-simultaneous measurements of 1H, 23Na and 35Cl in ordinary cementitious materials using nuclear magnetic resonance was built. This setup makes use of the main field of a whole body magnetic resonance imaging system (Philips Intera), which has allowed us to combine two measurement setups into one, i.e., a 23Na/35Cl and a 1H insert. This 1.5 T field was chose...

A support tower is the main structure which would support rotor, power transmission and control systems, and elevates the rotating blades above the earth boundary layer. A successful design should ensure safe, efficient and economic design for the whole wind turbine system. It should provide easy construction and easy access for maintenance of the rotor components and sub-components. UHPC mater...

The incorporation of silica fume into the normal concrete is a routine one in the present days to produce the tailor made high strength and high performance concrete. The design parameters are increasing with the incorporation of silica fume in conventional concrete and the mix proportioning is becoming complex. The main objective of this paper has been made to investigate the different mechani...