Bendable Concrete
Image Source: National Geographic
First they have bendable concrete, then these engineers introduced light transmitting concrete to the world, now we have a self-healing concrete that is bendable.
A team led by Victor Li of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor has developed a new type of concrete that bends under pressure and the best part is, it can repair itself! The self-healing concrete develops many hairline fractures when bent, distributing the pressure over its area. The tiny cracks will seal themselves with calcium carbonate when exposed to rainwater and carbon dioxide.
A slab of self-healing concrete bends under 5 percent tensile strain, the force needed to stretch a material by 5 percent of its initial size. While ordinary concrete would crumble under such pressure, the new material forms micro-cracks that can then auto-seal after being exposed to water and carbon dioxide, researchers said in March 2009. Source
A safer building during earthquakes.
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Engineered Bendable Concrete
Who said concrete is week at tension? Guess your construction lecturers was wrong after all.
A new type of fiber-reinforced bendable concrete has been developed at the University of Michigan.
The new concrete is 500 times more resistant to cracking and 40 percent lighter in weight. The materials in the concrete itself are designed for maximum flexibility.
The Engineered Cement Composites technology has been used already on projects in Japan, Korea, Switzerland and Australia, but has had slow adoption in the US, said engineering professor Victor Li.
Traditional concrete presents many problems: lack of durability and sustainability, failure under severe loading, and the resulting expenses of repair. ECC should address most of those problems. The ductile, or bendable, concrete is made mainly of the same ingredients in regular concrete minus the coarse aggregate. It looks exactly like regular concrete, but under excessive strain, the ECC concrete gives because the network of fibers veining the cement is allowed to slide within the cement, thus avoiding the inflexibility that causes brittleness and breakage.
Tags: Bendable Concrete, Concrete Compression, Engineered Concrete, University of Michigan, Victor Li
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