Trade Journals for the Concrete Industry

In the last couple of years the well-documented rise in steel prices, which is the second most used material after concrete, put a lot of pressure on project managers and engineers to find ways to reduce cost. Steel is used in beams, girders, rebars, mesh or fibres, just to name a few. Steel fabric is mainly used to control drying shrinkage and thermal cracking for example in slabs. To position steel mesh on site is very labour intensive and time consuming. For the production of slabs, the concrete further needs to be pumped from the ready mix truck since the already placed steel mesh prevents direct access for the truck discharger to the area of concrete placement. The above-mentioned disadvantages have lead to increased use of fibre reinforced concrete (FRC), where deformed steel fibres are mixed directly into concrete replacing the steel fabric