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RILEM TC 266-MRP: round-robin rheological tests on high performance mortar and concrete with adapted rheology—rheometers, mixtures and procedures

  • RILEM TC 266-MRP - Round-Robin Rheological Tests
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Abstract

Recent developments in understanding the rheology of mortar and concrete as well as applying this understanding in the practice of construction necessitate an accurate assessment of materials’ rheological properties. It is well known that different rheometers for mortar and concrete deliver different results, as this was shown over 15 years ago in two measuring campaigns comparing concrete rheometers. Considering newly developed rheometers, including those to evaluate interface rheology and structural build-up at rest, as well as additional measurement procedures and data interpretation techniques, a new comparison campaign was carried out in 2018 at the Université d’Artois, in Bethune, France. This new campaign focused on measuring workability characteristics, flow curves, static yield stress values, interface properties and tribological data. A total of 14 different devices capable of measuring one or more of the above-mentioned characteristics were employed. These devices included four ICAR rheometers, the Viskomat XL, the eBT-V, the RheoCAD (two geometries), the 4SCC rheometer (two geometries), the plate test, the sliding pipe rheometer, a tribometer and an interface tool for the ICAR rheometer. This paper describes the mixture design and rationale of the five investigated concrete and three investigated mortar mixtures, design and analysis of the experiments, and comparison of test results. The findings confirmed some of the conclusions from two previous testing campaigns and expanded the findings to more modern concrete mixtures and more diversified sets of rheological devices. The investigated rheometers yielded different absolute values for material parameters, but they all were able to similarly distinguish between mixtures qualitatively. For static yield stress and interface rheology measurements, similar conclusions were obtained as for flow curves.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to acknowledge EQIOM Concrete for the donation, delivery and adjustment of the investigated mixtures. The technical support of the mix design team of EQIOM Concrete in changing the rheological properties of the mixtures to suit the testing program is greatly appreciated. The authors wish to express their gratitude and sincere appreciation to the French Group of Rheology (GFR), the agglomeration community Artois Com, the French National Federation of Public Works (FNTP), the Structure&Réhabilitation company, The Université d’Artois and the Laboratoire de Génie Civil et géo-Environnement (LGCgE) for giving financial support to perform this study. The authors acknowledge the support of the Civil Engineering Department of the Université d’Artois for making their facilities available to the research team, as well as Francis Thibaut (technical staff), Sacha Crepelle, Apolline Dilly, Agnaou Elhachemi, Salim Hammoumi, Issam Laiymani and Edouard Morel (students) for their help during three intensive days of testing.

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Correspondence to Dimitri Feys.

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This document is the result of an experimental campaign supported by and carried out by a taskgroup of RILEM TC 266-MRP. All members of the taskgroup are listed as authors for this paper, except for Faber Fabbris from EQIOM concrete. The following individuals are the members of RILEM TC 266-MRP who were not involved in the taskgroup: Rolands Cepuritis, Geert De Schutter, Siamak Fakhraei, Steffen Grunewald, Michael Haist, Stefan Jacobsen, Karel Lesage, Julian Link, Dirk Lowke, Tilo Proske, Nicolas Roussel, Wolfram Schmidt, Jon E. Wallevik, Ammar Yahia, and Jiang Zhu. This paper was reviewed and approved by all members of the committee.

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Feys, D., Sonebi, M., Amziane, S. et al. RILEM TC 266-MRP: round-robin rheological tests on high performance mortar and concrete with adapted rheology—rheometers, mixtures and procedures. Mater Struct 56, 90 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1617/s11527-023-02173-1

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