Offshore UHPC farms after 6 years
It feels like it was yesterday when the entire RDC team went to Vasc Country to install our first raft, the first floating UHPC farm in the world. It was October of 2016. Now, 6 years later, is already a good moment to start checking if this solution is as good as we promised under the dynamic and aggressive marine environment.
Traditional rafts are 20 x 27 m floating structures typically made of eucalyptus wood and six steel floaters protected with GFRP. These structures are flexible and economic, but their lifespan does not generally exceed the 15 years, and their maintenance costs are significant. This problem was noticed by RDC, which designed and patented a UHPC raft in 2015.
Tensile behaviour of UHPC (III). Into FRC tensile response
In the third post of “Tensile behaviour of UHPC” we start talking about UHPC…, finally 🙂 Don’t miss the two previous posts dealing with tensile properties of plain concrete and some important properties of it, such as scale-effect and brittleness. In this post we talk about (i) the reason underlying the use of fibres in concrete; (ii) the mechanical response of fibre-reinforced concretes and how it differs from plain concrete; and (iii) we show a typical constitutive behaviour of UHPC. Enjoy it !!
What is UHPC? – Part 1: Birth of UHPC
The term UHPC stands for Ultra-High-Performance Fibre-Reinforced Concrete. It did not appear from nowhere, but from decades of evolution on concrete technology and the hard and thorough work of both international scientific community and private companies. This term encompasses several properties and technologies which are hidden beyond the literal meaning of each word, requiring a further explanation based on concrete technology history. This post tries to offer a broad perspective of the continuous process that ended up in the birth of UHPC and a definition of what this term really stands for. The way and the reasons why conventional concrete evolved into UHPC are the first step we need to take to start understanding UHPC. Are you ready for it?
UHPC for people- The RDC Blog
This blog was born with the idea to foster the use of new concrete technologies on architectural, civil engineering and industrial applications, i.e. to foster innovation in concrete. Lack of confindence, education and training on these innovative technologies on the part of engineers and architects are probably the main barriers these new materials must overcome to achieve that. These are the barriers we want to help remove using one single tool: knowledge.
