Professor Li | University of Michigan

Beginning my research, this was one video that came up. Professor Li of the University of Michigan College of Engineering has been studying bendable concrete for some time now. He has even gone as far as placing test strips on roads to see if it is a feasible replacement to standard concrete. It was very interesting to learn about some other things about flexible concrete. It had never crossed my mind that the steel could rust and expand causing the concrete to crack which is a force that can easily be mitigated by the flexible concrete. I also didn't think that the flexible concrete could fix its cracks with just air and water. This is important considering, in places like Buffalo where the winter weather tears roads apart, pot holes may never be able to form since the water that would fill the cracks could then help fix those cracks.

This video is also helpful in showing how differently standard and flexible concrete act under normal, every-day loading capacities and even how much higher of a load the flexible concrete can take when compared to standard concrete.

Introduction

Hello, welcome to my blog. For this blog I will be discussing some of the research I am doing for my University at Buffalo English 201 paper. For this paper I am looking to research flexible concrete.

Normally, concrete is a mixture of water, sand, small rocks (also known as aggregate), and cement. This mixture remains slightly fluid and allows you to pour it over steel rebar and form it into any shape needed for the structure. When the concrete is loaded with a weight, whether this is a car on a driveway or a house on its foundation, the concrete wants to bend downward which causes the bottom side of the concrete to separate and crack. This is where the rebar comes into play. The rebar takes the tensile loading that causes the concrete to crack. It is fairly easy to imagine how these two different materials act in tensile loading. To imagine concrete, take a granola bar and pull on both ends. Then, to imagine steel rebar, take a piece of string and pull on both ends. You should notice that, when compared, the string takes a lot more force to break than the granola bar. When putting concrete together with steel, a high strength material is created.

For flexible concrete, the aggregate and steel are replaced by high strength fibers and allow for a similar material to be built. The only exception to this is that it will be a much lighter weight material and, possibly, a cheaper and higher strength material. With this paper, I'm hoping to research the feasibility of flexible concrete as a replacement to standard concrete for home foundations, driveways, load-bearing columns, and explore some of its other uses along with exploring its financial feasibility.