Since its first appearance on the Japanese market, at the beginning of the nineties, the use of Self-Compacting Concrete (SCC) has expanded tremendously. In Europe, mainly the prefabrication industry has realised the many advantages SCC has to offer with regards to the concrete quality as well as labour conditions, and has already largely switched its production. The big breakthrough in the ready-mixed concrete industry is however still pending. According to a survey of the European Ready Mixed Concrete Organisation [1], on average less than 2% of the ready mixed concrete produced in Europe is self-compacting. This reticence is partly due to the lack of guidelines and standards. The publication of the new standard EN 206-9:2010 – for the fresh concrete properties – in the spring of 2010 has alleviated at least part of this short-coming. For structural calculations it is however still not clear whether standards such as Eurocode 2 [2] are still applicable and provide adequate safety for SCC. Therefore within this paper a research project – which had as main focus the evaluation of the mechanical performance of SCC – is presented. The results of this research seem to indicate that for certain characteristics, as there are tensile strength and E-modulus, Eurocode 2 still provides a good and safe estimation of the performance of the material. For other properties, for example shrinkage, however an extension of the Eurocode 2 expressions is deemed necessary to include SCC.
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