Hanley Wood’s Infrastructure Imperative conference was last week in Cleveland. The program and 15 speakers were exceptional and the timing excellent. Rumbles out of Washington indicate federal funding could be back on the agenda. Getting an agreement will be time-consuming, but even politicians know we can’t remain globally competitive without decent infrastructure. All of us in this business want to use our brains and hands to help, and we will. We know how to design and deliver more-resilient structures more efficiently, so there’s no excuse.
Huge Potential Realized
In 2002, former Concrete Construction Senior Editor Joe Nasvik convinced me to run an article about polished concrete. I thought it would be a fad, something used occasionally as a decorative technique or for low-maintenance floors in big-box stores. However, his “huge potential for a brand-new industry” tag line proved to be prescient.
Today, the Concrete Polishing Council is one of the American Society of Concrete Contractors’ (ASCC) most active groups. As the industry continues evolving, we continue bringing you new ideas, such as using distinction of image (DOI) and haze rather than 60-degree specular gloss to evaluate a polished floor. We’ll discuss using surface measurements to define aesthetics, what testing criteria are available, and opportunities for standardizing expectations at World of Concrete’s Polishing Luncheon & Forum in January 2019. To register, go to www.worldofconcrete.com and click on “Events” in the top-navigation bar.
Air Apparent
At ASCC’s Finishing Committee meeting in September, we discussed two things that may affect maintaining proper air content in slabs: pumping concrete and high-range water reducers made from polycarboxylates.
Tyler Ley at Oklahoma State University is looking into the first issue. Conventional wisdom is that pumping reduces air content, but Ley’s research seems to show that’s not so. He thinks the air dissolves into the concrete during pumping but bubbles re-form after the pressure is released. As for polycarboxylates, several contractors reported experiencing high air contents when using this admixture.I got lots of responses when I wrote about this in my online blog, mostly from ready-mixed producers. While there seems to be a consensus there’s a potential problem, research is needed to determine the best way to deal with this issue.
