Remedial Measures to prevent failure of Concrete

Remedies adopted to prevent failure of Concrete

Prevention of failure of Concrete will help preventing the building from failure. Good quality concreting strengthens the building and keeps it standing. Failure of Concrete results in structural failure of the building. Therefore, to prevent this from happening, measures have to be taken in order to strengthen the building and prevent it from structural failure.

Capping

It does not affect the strength adversely and reduces scatter compared with uncapped specimens.

Grinding

• Very good, expensive, very satisfactory results; it is done using silicon carbide abrasion. Specimens give same strength as cast face results.

• Ideal capping shall have stress-strain properties similar to concrete, so that no splitting can take place and to achieve uniform stress distribution, it shall be 1.5mm to 3mm thick. A strong capping can increase the strength of the specimen.

• Influence of capping is higher on high and medium strength concretes.

• Capping can be done with neat cement after 2 hours of casting (to allow for plastic shrinkage of concrete). Dental plaster also can be used for capping due to its early strength gain and smooth finish it is viscous too. Do not use plaster of paris due to its low strength.

• Best capping would be sulphur mixed with a granular material like milled fried clay. This mixture is applied in molten state and is allowed to harden. This is suitable for concrete of strength 100Mpa also.

• Capping produces lower results than ‘ground’ specimens due to the loss of strength associated with capping.

• (If concrete is homogeneous and is un-segregated, (only then) the results of compression tests are valid. This test (compression test) offers no quantitative date, but it can only be used for composition.