Concrete fence walls rely on good cememt in the mix
With our experience building precast concrete fences and walls from our main office in Los Angeles, we've become pretty comfortable with a good understanding of the concrete and cement business. Despite what you read normally, "concrete" and "cement" are not the same thing. Sidewalks and foundations are constructed from concrete, not cement, although cement is a vital and significant ingredient of concrete. Other ingredients include gravel or crushed stone (also known as aggregate), sand, water and, other performance-enhancing additives. The trucks you see that people refer to as cement mixers are really concrete mixers; cement, like talcum powder, is transported mainly in tank trucks.
The cement in concrete is known as Portland cement, because Joseph Aspdin, an English bricklayer who invented the earliest version, felt that its color was almost the same as limestone quarried on the Isle of Portland, a peninsula on England's southern coast. Aspdin got a patent for cement in 1824. He used to heat limestone and clay in a kiln until parts of the mixture fused, then he ground the mixture into a fine powder. Adding water to the powder yielded a workable paste and started a chemical process, hydration, in which the water bonded with compounds of calcium, silicon, aluminum and iron, and caused the whole thing to combine into a rigid mass. Wet Portland cement doesn't merely "dry," hydration transforms it into a chemically distinct material, which continues to gain strength over time.
Concrete is actually pretty easy to actually pull apart. A way to compensate for this tensile weakness (that means it's easy to break apart) is to add steel reinforcing rods, known as rebar, which hold the concrete in place overall when it cracks.
Another way to reinforce the cement is by adding short lengths of threadlike fibers made of steel, polypropylene, polyolefin, and other materials-samples. Polypropylene is a good idea for an additional reason - it can provide extra fire protection. So by adding polypropylene fibers to the mix it can reduce the risk of such failures, because in high heat the fibers melt, leaving voids that act like relief valves for steam. Such concrete can provide extra protection in structures that may be exposed to any of a variety of increasingly ordinary-seeming perils of modern existence, among them fires, explosions, and bomb blasts.
Craig Lewis is CEO of Artisan Precast, Inc., the innovation and customer-care leader in concrete fence walls and high quality fences and installation services to assure the on-time execution of your landscape project. Since 1982, their brands - Woodcrete®, Brickcrete®, Fencestone®, Cedarcrete® and Woodcrete® Rail,- have become widely accepted by architects, landscape designers, engineers, residential, commercial and industrial developers, utility companies, government agencies, and others in the construction industry.
Published July 24th, 2007
Filed in Gardening, Home, Real Estate
