About UHPC
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| Hits: 20945Discovery of Ultra-High Performance Concrete
Steel fiber reinforced reactive powder concrete (SFR-RPC) was first introduced by the French in the mid 1990's with the mechanical properties of their RPC demonstrated compressive strength greater than 200 MPa and modulus of rupture of 20-50 MPa. Today, this type of concrete is more commonly known as the ultra-high performance concrete (UHPC) instead of reactive powder concrete (RPC) due to this composite tends to exhibit superior properties such as advanced strength, durability and long-term stability when comparing to high-performance concrete (HPC). Although this technology has been developed in recent decades, yet, its presence still remains in the infant stage for many developing nations.
Steel fiber reinforced reactive powder concrete (SFR-RPC) was first introduced by the French in the mid 1990's with the mechanical properties of their RPC demonstrated compressive strength greater than 200 MPa and modulus of rupture of 20-50 MPa. Today, this type of concrete is more commonly known as the ultra-high performance concrete (UHPC) instead of reactive powder concrete (RPC) due to this composite tends to exhibit superior properties such as advanced strength, durability and long-term stability when comparing to high-performance concrete (HPC). Although this technology has been developed in recent decades, yet, its presence still remains in the infant stage for many developing nations.
Since then, many researchers/organizations around the world have developed concrete that could be classified as UHPC (such as Ductal®, Ceracem®, BSI®, Densit®). Although there are differences among the type of these UHPC, there also are many overall similarities. The Association Française de Génie Civil (AFGC, 2002) indicated that UHPC tends to have the following properties: Compressive strength that is greater than 150 MPa, internal fiber reinforcement to ensure non-brittle behaviour, and high binder content with special aggregate. Further more, UHPC tends to have a very low water-binder ratio and can achieved sufficient rheological properties through a combination of optimized granular packing and the addition of high-range water reducing admixtures.