Laboratory and In situ Investigation of Modulus of Elasticity of Foam Concrete

Abstract

Foam concrete (FC) is a building material which consists of a combination of cement, water additives and technical foam. This material has some useful advantages such as low density, high stiffness and compression and flexural strength in comparison to the granular fill materials, good thermal resistance or damping potential. It’s currently used as a levelling layer for floors or as a sub-base layer of the new pavements or industrial floors or at the road reconstructions and excavations. Because of utilization of the foam concrete is aimed at the horizontal slab-like structures, deformation characteristics such as modulus of elasticity are important for the design of such a layer. High porosity of the final material reaching almost 70% of the volume complicates the determination of the stiffness parameters. Its stiffness is higher in comparison with the conventional granular fill materials but when thin layer is proposed, membrane like behavior influenced by the local imperfections of the material and the geometry can affect the overall stiffness of the compound. This paper presents the firsts attempts to estimate the modulus of elasticity of foam concrete of dry bulk density of 400 kg·m-3 in laboratory and as a derived value from in situ load tests using SOJUZDORNII theory.

Determination of the deformation characteristics of the foam concrete as a sub-base

“…The SOJUZDORNII theory is one of them. However, this theory is very sensitive to input data especially in case of subgrade material [22].…”

Experimental and Numerical Verification of the Railway Track Substructure with Innovative Thermal Insulation Materials

“…The initiator of the research of the possibility of using the FC layer in the construction of the railway track substructure was the company iwtech Ltd. (London, UK) [ 39 ], which has been cooperating with the University of Žilina-Faculty of Civil Engineering (Žilina, Slovakia) for several years. Based on research cooperation agreement between them, thermal technical parameters [ 40 ], deformation characteristics [ 41 , 42 ], and dynamic characteristics [ 43 , 44 ] were determined for the foamed concrete layer and the possibility of its use in road subbase layers [ 45 ] or as a subbase of industrial floors [ 46 ] was assessed too. More than 10 years of scientific cooperation between them resulted in the granting of three patents in the field of application of composite foamed concrete in civil engineering structures with the aim of creating a subbase of high bearing capacity and with its minimized thickness and with uniform quality in the whole area and in the whole volume.…”