Building materials

News

Fort Collins, Colorado, Making Community Resilience a Reality Using NIST Guide

July 28, 2016

Guided in part by strategies and procedures developed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) for...

Colorado County Adopts NIST Community Resilience Guidelines

June 29, 2016

The Boulder County Collaborative, a partnership of Boulder County, Colorado, communities formed in response to the...

Limestone Powder Enhances Performance of 'Green' Concrete

September 03, 2013

Adding limestone powder to "green" concrete mixtures—those containing substantial amounts of fly ash, a byproduct of...

Experts Propose Research Priorities for Making Concrete 'Greener'

April 03, 2013

The challenge of making concrete greener—reducing its sizable carbon footprint without compromising performance—is just...

Events

Service Life Prediction of Polymeric Materials: Reaching New Heights

March 18, 2018 to March 24, 2018

This conference will establish the current state of service life prediction methodologies and produce the roadmap for future technical, standards, and...

Publications

Modeling and Measuring Chloride Ingress into Cracked Mortar

August 08, 2016

Author(s):

Scott Z. Jones, Jeffery Davis, John L. Molloy, John R. Sieber, Dale P. Bentz

Chloride ingress into reinforced concrete structures is responsible for initiating corrosion of steel embedded into concrete. To aide in the prediction of...

Chloride Diffusivity in Hardened Cement Paste from Microscale Analyses and Accounting for Binding Effects

August 05, 2016

Author(s):

Pietro Carrara, Laura De Lorenzis, Dale P. Bentz

We study the diffusion of chloride ions in hardened cement paste (HCP) under steady-state conditions and accounting for the highly heterogenous nature of the...

Particle size-dependent environmental release of semiconductor nanocrystals from free-standing polymer nanocomposite films

May 31, 2016

Author(s):

Li Piin Sung, Karthik V. Pillai, Patrick Gray, Reiner Bleher, Timothy V. Duncan

Concomitant with the development of polymer nanocomposite (PNC) technologies across numerous industries is an expanding awareness of the uncertainty with which...

Calibration of rheometers for cementitious materials

May 16, 2016

Author(s):

Chiara F. Ferraris, Nicos Martys, William L. George, Edward J. Garboczi, Alex Olivas

The calibration of rheometers to determine the rheological properties of cement based materials ranging from cement paste to concrete cannot be done using...

Projects & Programs

Measurement Science to Assure the Performance of Innovative Concretes

The concrete industry has developed strategies for making innovative concrete, which is defined as a sustainable concrete that uses less resources for...

Advanced Sensing Systems for Building Energy Monitoring

Advances in sensing technologies through miniaturization of sensors, wireless communications, and the integration of sensors with microprocessing capabilities...

Chemical, Structural, and Kinetic Measurement Technologies for Cementitious Materials

The unceasing quest for more durable, more environmentally friendly, and less expensive construction materials is compelling the concrete industry to adopt...

Measurement Science Tools for Accelerated Weathering of Polymers Project

There is pressure on U.S. industry to develop innovative solutions to meet increasing customer and regulatory demands for sustainable manfactured materials...

Software

Internal Curing with Lightweight Aggregates

(Return to Cement Hydration and Degradation Modeling Software) The American Concrete Institute in 2010 defined internal curing as "supplying water throughout a...

Concrete Optimization Software Tool

(Return to Cement Hydration and Degradation Modeling Software) COST (Concrete Optimization Software Tool) is an online design/analysis system to assist...

Chloride-Exposed Steel-Reinforced Concrete Service Life Prediction Program

(Return to Cement Hydration and Degradation Modeling Software) In the last decade or so, numerous advances have occurred in the field of information technology...

HCSSMODEL Software

(Return to Cement Hydration and Degradation Modeling Software) A package of computer programs for simulating the microstructure of a three-dimensional cubic...

Tools & Instruments

Integrating Sphere-based Weathering Device

In the artificial ultraviolet (UV) weathering of materials, a need exists for weathering devices that can uniformly illuminate test specimens with a high level...

Line Heat-Source Guarded Hot Plate

The 1-meter guarded hot-plate apparatus measures thermal conductivity of building insulation. This facility provides for absolute measurement of thermal...