Experimental Study on After-Mixing Temperature Control of Concrete in Batching Plant Production

Abstract

Calculation of the concrete temperature in production phase is an important parameter to control the concrete quality, confining inconsistencies, and costly corrections. In order to obtain after mixing temperature of concrete, the before mixing temperature and weight of the constituent material as well as the moisture contents of the aggregates are collected. Using heat balance equilibrium of the concrete material is an easy and widely used method to calculate after-mixing temperature of the concrete. ACI 306R-10 has presented an equation to calculate the concrete temperature based on thermal equilibrium of the constituents. To evaluate the performance of the equation in estimation of the concrete temperature an experiment is conducted. In the experimental site test results of the output from a batching plant is recorded and graphed. The results of the after induction temperature were calculated using the formula presented in ACI. However, the proposed equation predicts smaller temperature values compared to the actual ones. In the final step the reasons for deviation in the results was discussed and an equation is derived to calculate the concrete temperature for post-mixing stages. The obtained equation was tested on other data and the results show that the method could predict the results reliably.