Preface
Concrete is the most widely used material in the world. It plays an important role in infrastructure and private buildings construction. Understanding the basic behaviors of concrete is essential for civil engineering students to become civil engineering professionals. There have been some very good books regarding concrete, including Concrete by Mindess, Young, and Darwin, Concrete: Structure, Properties, and Materials by Mehta and Monteriro, and Concrete Technology by Neville and Brook. The motivation to write this book is to introduce new methodologies, new developments, and new innovations in concrete technology.
The
unique features of this book include the introduction of end use guided
research strategy for concrete, unification of materials and structures
studies, and an emphasize on fundamental exploration of concrete
structures, state of art of concrete development, and innovations. This
book provides more comprehensive
knowledge on concrete technology, including the systematic introduction of concrete fracture
mechanics and nondestructive evaluation for concrete engineering.
The
book is divided into nine chapters. Chapter 1 gives a brief
introduction of concrete, including its historic development and
advantages. Chapter 2 provides the knowledge of raw materials used for
making concrete, covering aggregates, binders, admixtures, and water.
Chapter 3 discusses the properties of fresh concrete, including
workability and the corresponding measurement methods. Chapter 4 focuses
on the structure of concrete at different scales, especially the
calcium silicate hydrate at nanometer scale. Chapter 5 covers the
properties of hardened concrete, including strength, durability,
stress–strain relation, and dimension stability. Chapter 6 provides
updated knowledge on various cement-based composites, including
self-consolidation concrete, ultra-high-strength concrete, and extruded
and engineered cementitious composites.
Chapter
7 focuses the fracture behavior of concrete and provides the basic
knowledge of fracture mechanics of concrete. Chapter 8 covers the
essential knowledge of nondestructive testing of concrete engineering,
including wave propagation theory in 1-D case, detecting principles of
different NDT methodologies and techniques of different NDT methods. In
Chapter 9, the issues regarding the future and development trend of
concrete have been discussed.
Although
the book is designed and written primarily to meet the teaching needs
for undergraduate students at senior level and graduate students at
entry level, it can serve as a reference or a guide for professional
engineers in their practice. In the process of writing this book, the
authors received enthusiastic help and invaluable assistance from many
people, which is deeply appreciated. The authors would like to express
his
special thanks to Dr. Garrison C. K. Chau, Dr. Biwan Xu, and Dr.
Jianzhong Shen for their help in editing the book draft. Mr. Mike
Pomfret is acknowledged for his professional page proofreading. The
photos provided by Profs. Wei Sun, Tongbo Sui, Linhai Han, and Zhen He
Drs. Xiaojian Gao, Herbert Zheng, and Jinyang Jiang; Mr. Peter Allen;
and the companies of Ove Arup and Gammon are greatly appreciated.
The support from China Basic Research Grant, Basic Research on Environmentally Friendly
Contemporary Concrete (2009CB623200) is greatly acknowledged.
Finally, I would like to thank for my wife, Xiuming Cui, my daughters Yexin Li and Aileen
Li for their love, understanding, and support.