Elegance, performance, durability
Concrete is a material widely used to build pavements. More specifically, imprinted concrete is a very common solution for outer floors, having the advantage of the versatility in colours and textures and its relatively good durability. Some of the limitations of this solution are the slowness of the process, the need to execute joints and the weight of the concrete per square meter. The use of precast concrete slabs is limiting due to their significant weight per square meter, which limits the size of the piece. However, with UHPC it is possible to precast high-quality slabs with reduced thickness (20 to 40 mm) and sizes that can exceed 10 m2. This solution has several benefits:
Advantages:
- High industrialization, so that in few hours a large area can be covered without specialized workforce.
- The application errors and wrong procedures generally associated to in-situ works are avoided.
- Minimum load per square meter, which is an advantage when working on slabs, bridges, or cantilevers.
- Reduction of the transportation and installation costs due to the reduced weight of the solution per square meter.
- UHPC fineness allows to replicate a wide variety of textures with different colours. This gives the anti-slipping capacity and an aesthetic that can be integrated in a large variety of environments.
- The UHPC outer floor coverings have an improved impact capacity and abrasion resistance, which is important to minimize the maintenance costs of the structure.
- The UHPC slabs can serve a double purpose: Be the pavement and be at the same time the structural deck. For example, in several footbridges RDC has used as deck 30-mm slabs, which have a crucial role in the structural behaviour and at the same time are the surface for the pedestrian walkway.
