Consumer grade ballistic concrete testing

This is why.

 

I found an unlimited supply of fly ash almost in my own back yard.
I got a tip that tolk power station in earth Texas practically gives away their fly ash.
This would allow me to make really cheap high strength, high density, low permeability, low water, crack resistant concrete.
Hey maybe they would even sell me some of their powder basen valley coal.

 

Watching science channel late at night there was a show on about chinas great wall.
Apparently building a wall does keep out illegal immigrants.
But any who one of the things they used to make their bricks' mortar stronger was sticky rice water.

Now if you look back I tested that adding something to the water to make the concrete stronger did work, bit it was really, really expensive and did make the concrete a little stronger but not by much.
I think you wold be looking at a cost of at least $75 per yard with acrylic hardener to make it a little stronger.
Almost everything else I tested preformed far better than adding acrylic hardener, for as little as $5 per yard.
But rice is cheap.
Could sticky rice water work almost as well as modern super expensive acrylic hardener for only a fraction of the price?
Maybe someone should find out.

 

I saw this:


Reminded me of this post.

After poking around on the Internet searching out concrete related subjects no where have I seen anything like this post. All the concrete info is usually superduper application specific and directed towards concrete industry people who have been doing it for a decade or 2 who can talk the talk plus walk the walk and civil engineers who can at least do the hard math and talking parts.
No where could I find a fairly wide ranging test to answer the question of can a fairly normal person make really strong ballistic like concrete.

So everything was super app specific or some ape with a rifle blowing away un-speced concrete. We need something kind of inbetween. An ape with a rifle at least attempting to compare a control sample to experimental samples under somewhat controlled, repeatable conditions.

 

Think of concrete like improved dirt.

If it works for dirt it will work for comcrete, remember the multi layer concrete with stucco mesh or chicken wire?

Concrete and water.

 

I accidentally advanced the field.
One thing anyone can do any where to make concrete stronger, use water that's had the air removed.

Over the last few weeks I installed inverter based split heat pump units at my house and I installed them in accordance with the strictest code I could find which was hurricane code. Where you put the split unit on a concrete pad instead of a cheap plastic base. Turns out that in sustained high winds your air conditioner can become a projectile, aided by the light weight plastic base.

So winter came in the middle of October again I was trying to figure out how to pour pads and not have it freeze.
I figured I would start with hot water, not something that you really want to do in summer with low cement to sand to aggregate ratio mix because of the heat it puts off. Then cover the pad with insulation to keep the cold air off it. But I needed to separate the concrete from the insulation so I covered it with a plastic sheet.

Well I found out later using water that has been degassed or boiled makes for more favorable air pockets. The air bubbles that setup in side your concrete are smaller, more numerous, more spread out and over all it reduces air volume. All good things for making strong concrete.

Just putting plastic over the concrete helped trap water, which we know aids the hydration reaction.

So I will probably be using water that's been boiled or almost boiled to make concrete used in stuff that matters.
During the sumer I will have to figure a way heat up the water and let it cool off in a sealed container so it does not saturate with air again. Or just pour when its cooler.

 

OLD concrete is a lot harder than 1 month old concrete
some old concrete is VERY HARD......i don't know if it is the age or the mix

 

Keeping the concrete wet is like artificial aging. As it aids the hydration reaction.

 

Looking at some "how to build concrete buildings" stuff the roof or floor on building B is stronger than building A.
Building B is called a continuous slab. What holds up the roof can be a wall or a pillar.

 

Refractory concrete?

 

I once bought a rent house made of cinder blocks, What was unique was there were no rocks locally, What was used was crushed oyster shells in the mix,Very hard stuff even to drive a nail in.

 

I have seen concrete like that when I lived in japan.

 

Fiberglass rebar appears to be common now and the same price as steel rebar.

 

Mmmmm. Man made aggregate.
In really thicc pours this agg may be able to stop crack propagation.

"In college we learned dirt is heavy"

 

"Seismic" hooks lol
Any little tip on trick or detail that helps keep concrete from blowing apart when subjected to an extreme dynamic force is welcome.

 

I understand that the tilt up concrete structures are made with pretensioning the rebar.
The same was done by engineers making concrete skis.
Creating tension compacts the material indefinitely.
Has this been looked into?

 

I mentioned sticky rice water. How about sticky potato water?
Engineers Built a New Kind of Concrete 2x Stronger Than the Real Thing

• Engineers from the University of Manchester say their concrete is twice as strong as conventional concrete.
• The engineers believe future space construction will need this solution.
• Potato starch replaces human blood as a key ingredient in the new recipe.
• The University of Manchester's new “StarCrete” is twice as strong as traditional concrete, making it a potential solution as a building material for Mars. Add in some extraterrestrial dust and potato starch, and you have a potentially revolutionary new material. In an article published in the journal Open Engineering, the research team showed that potato starch can act as a binder when mixed with simulated Mars dust to produce a concrete-like material reaching a compressive strength of 72 megapascals (MPa), over twice as strong as the 32 MPa seen in ordinary concrete. Of course, mix in moon dust instead and you can get StarCrete to 91 MPa.
• 
  This strength makes it a possible solution, according to the researchers, for a building solution on Mars as astronauts mix Martian soil with potato starch—and a pinch of salt, no joke—to give extra-terrestrial-suited concrete.
  

 

Using blood to make space concrete was a stupid idea.