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Training Session by Xypex Australia

Cornell Engineers – Brisbane Structural Engineers was pleased to host Jonny and James from Xypex Australia for a structural engineer training session on the benefits of Xypex concrete additive and waterproofing coatings on Friday 15 June 2018.

It was a fascinating insight into the benefits of the Xypex product and how it can be used to improve the qualities of concrete in residential, civil, commercial and industrial structures.

Thank you very much to Jonny and James for their time.
Here’s the presentation:

And some interesting links:

Thank you very much to Xypex for allowing us to share this presentation.

Subtitles

Very fantastic. Well yeah. I’d like to like to say thanks a lot to Matt for organizing us to come in.

I know that your contact is going to do a presentation so we’re delighted to come in.

What we do is we do like to engage with the engineers and architects out there to probably give you some assistance and so you get best outcomes for clients and best outcomes for situations which is where we’re at in a collaborative approach but essentially you need to know what we can do and also we also need to know what types of problems you’re faced with so we can do that. So hopefully, as we go through today’s presentation we’ll address a few of these things and feel free to interrupt at any time if you’ve got any pressing questions that we can address for you as we go through. Now you’ll see quite an exhaustive list. It’ll pop up here but ultimately we’re going to cover off on a few things.

I’m going to give you a background into Xypex
crystalline technology. We’re going to address more importantly, I suppose, things that we’ve identified through research and feel for the market as we look at things that affect concrete like the deterioration process of reinforced structures and that doesn’t necessarily only affects a bridge or it just affects that it’s commonplace across the majority of concrete structures. Can I quantify that problem and put the cost involved in these types of things. One is doing it right the first time and the retrospective cost of trying to rehabilitate structures further down the line. We’re going to address how Xypex can impact these things and how we work within the concrete and then we’re going to do give you an overview of a field test report both on a new structure and an existing structure and then we will look at oh it shouldn’t be listed as Xypex but we’re going to look at uh doing a bit of a Q and A and maybe a project overview just will flow through when we go through that.

So I said to meet the team. Well, I’m Johnny I’ve been with Xypex for the best part of seven and a half years. I’ve worked across a multitude of different projects both in the commercial residential sector and also within the civil side both mining and also the gas fields which have been quite lucky from the exposure to that of the recent boom that you’ve seen in the LNG sector and that goes both in Gladstone upstream and downstream and more recently up in Darwin. James, I’ll give you a little of an intro.

I’m James. I’m the state manager for Xypex Queensland my responsibility is I’m looking after a three-man team and there’s myself, Johnny and then there’s another guy that looks after the Gold Coast. My side of things is to help these guys their day-to-day gallons no different to what you probably do yourself so I guess that’s my responsibility. We just appreciate the opportunity to come in here today to hopefully help you guys in finding what’s what you guys find in the marketplace that the problems that we can help solve for you guys that’s ultimately our end goal today

Yeah, fantastic. So as I just gave you, Xypex itself is an international brand and has been in the market for as I say coming up to 50 years so founded in Canada in 1969 a couple of chemical engineers linked into the mining industry and essentially was designed there to shut down leaks within tunnel shafts and things from that the products developed and as I said now approaching almost 100 countries worldwide one of the great things you get I suppose when you walk within an organization that does have worldwide exposure is the amount of crossover you’ve got in relation to the test data all the different environmental areas you deal with and the different types of structures so we get an incredible amount of testing that is readily available for most scenarios.

As you can imagine that’s great having all that type of stuff available within you know Europe, Canada, South America but when you deal with even regional Queensland where you get up to say Queensland you’re dealing with a tropical Queensland environment it’s very different to what you what you would face say up in Vancouver or something in Canada or over in certain areas in Europe so the good thing is within Australia as you can see from there been on the market in Australia since 1991 so we’ve essentially got almost 30 years’ worth of field and test data and project cases to refer back to as well one of the good things we do do as well from a material supply perspective the product itself is manufactured in Australia down at our facility in Auburn Wadonga we did move into new manufacturing lab facility back in 2016 uh which has really geared us up for a lot of capacity and a lot more intensive research which has also led to an improvement and an increase in our technical capabilities in-house in relation to performance of the product and performance-based specifications. CSR is something that’s widespread I suppose through our organization Corporate Social Responsibility. It just really means we go in there with an environmental and a social aspect to it and we appreciate the impact that has in a society essentially but you see that it’s quite complex across a lot of organizations these days

all right so that covered the really the introduction of who we are all right so I mean I suppose this just summarizes where are the key problems that you tend to see the there’s reinforced structures I’m not sure from you guys exposure I mean obviously that’s not an extensive bliss but essentially what we’re saying is the more porous or permeable the concrete the more rapid these deterioration processes can be. Then ultimately there are ways of addressing those upfront.

Just putting a bit more flowchart so i suppose what we’re looking at is with with kind of concrete this is more painful the concrete the more accelerated these processes could be but you really need to have a carbonaceous you need to have a combination of moisture and your oxygen etc for these things to diffuse and penetrate into the concrete if it’s just the liquid itself yeah you may be doing too much issue depending what it is with the steel but ultimately you need the liquids in the gases which cause cause cause the issues now as you can imagine in different areas where you where you operate uh you know you’d be subject to aggressive soil conditions and then marine zones et cetera near the ocean you also get the threat of chloride attack and even when you’re just in those fringes you get things like airborne chlorides etc so when you look at things like chloride attack i mean that’s what the predominant predominantly the number one reason for the early failure and concrete structures is from the you know early induced corrosion from chloride ions now two things can happen i suppose when you’ve got attack from attack to the concrete or attack from the environment to the concrete as one is in relation to things that has the sulfates and things a lot is more prone to actually bring down the attack the matrix of the concrete yeah so with sulfate attack that generally speaking will attack the matrix of the concrete and they can citrate to the concrete see actually they then lose cover to the reinforcement and potential bit of spawn from that the difference between goodness was sulfate attack then as you go to chloride or some something like carbonation would be with that they really have a detrimental effect more so on the reinforcement so in relation to things like a carbonation what that is doing is reducing the ph level within the concrete which means essentially the reinforcement which is normally encased in a how alkaline environment is becoming under threat as they came with chemical composition changes within the concrete which means you you it starts the the process of corrosion relatively early

with chloride attack that’s a bit more of an electrochemical reaction that takes place uh and once again that passive layer around about the rebar is under threat and you get the the onset of corrosion for ebola i suppose the key to that is when the corrosion process starts to take place at the steel uh the steel itself actually starts to get bigger it expands so within concrete that steel can expand depending on how rapid the process is up to four to five times its size now with that means then you get propagating cracks which then it just even further accelerates the process and you get concrete spawn etc worst case scenario is as it’s getting bigger it actually loses cross-sectional strength and i suppose what that can lead to things like you know worst-case scenario collapse of the structure uh and yeah i mean occasionally from time to time in some of these bridge web pages or on linkedin you’ll see a bridge collapse here and there takes place and a lot of the time it comes comes from that type of thing uh and that’s why we mentioned earlier when we were in here talking about the council looking at doing some you know preventative maintenance walk on on some assets councils and things are relatively well aware of it it’s a bit of a ticking time bomb to see you know what the how their assets actually are but it’s something that is currently currently out there just to quantifying these types of things as you see a lot of some dramatic uh circumstances and i know we’re seeing the you know the collapse of a bridge / dam there but that’s not you know you imagine that down at uh it says surface paradise i mean just they’ll look at building for example i mean actually it’s been demolished and smashed down after about 30 years worth of service once again unsafe they fall into bits and you’ll see you see quite a lot of that out there but the issue you’ve got is is the type of costs and the money involved involved in it so if you look at the typical cost factor for most countries to maintain their existing concrete assets up to a safe and successful standard you’re looking at somewhere between three to five percent of their gdp so in an australian uh term i think back in just a ton of thousand uh they had so they had a figure in the region of about what was it oh i know in the u.s it was sort of 2.5 billion uk it was 750 sterling and i think in Australia we were looking at some of 1.2 billion Australian dollars so it’s astronomy what astronomical costs uh just to maintain existing concrete assets into a safe standard one project which i always remember being our concrete institute session up in darwin and they were they were talking about a similar similar type of subject and it was actually a bridge it was built in the uk or mid-1960s and they’ve just finished our refurbishment process on it took about five years because they had to try and keep traffic movements back in the central mohammed smith flyover built in as i said built in the 60s for the course with 1.5 million and they just spent uh something like 76 million sterling refurbishing it you know you’re getting different issues over there you get de-icing souls you know high-density population a lot of carbonation but all the all the concrete so maybe not the same high performance concrete you’re looking at again there’s some strength but that’s the type of cost you you know to rehabilitate these structures so if you can get it right first time you know they’ve got a huge benefit as you say to the environment because as you say there’s not a finite amount of raw materials and then when you do look at kind of things like concrete concrete you know one of his you’ve got your aggregates your sands et cetera etc but essentially what you do have is a high cement content within concrete or is one of the large portions that’s one of the biggest emitters of co2 around the world and obviously as you see you want to avoid safety issues now this is just an abstract as it says here from a Vic Roads department but as you see key things like carbonation, chloride ingress and acid and sulfate attack are key but you do have issues I suppose when you when we’re working about what you do still see issues with aar and asl take place we do have issues but you do have chemical attack depending on the nature of what the project would be even as simple she’s doing let’s say you may have something like chemical buns or you’ve got a a roof or a plant slab where you’ve got certain units on there that might have to deal with deal with spills but all these issues generally speaking can be can be controlled or restricted by you know making it difficult for moisture to move through concrete this particular one here delayed extra information have you you come across much of that what that tends to be is when we uh it tends to be more of your higher strength concrete so when you’re getting a concrete room about 50 mpa or above and maybe you’re doing with sort of mass pores so even if you were looking at

maybe even larger slabs but you’ve got big thickening beams running through them and you get mass pool concrete it’s all about controlling the heat so if your heat goes say above 70 degrees you’ve got thread off what they call delayed retrograde information that means these engineering crystals don’t form during the hydration process of the concrete during normal curing and as it said it’s delayed reaction so that can delay follow down the line with the introduction of water and then cause like cracking anything so it then creates a problem very similar to but as I say it’s more prevalent in mass poor high strength concrete and also in precast when you’re trying to get high strength gains very quickly to move the elements along the production line quite quickly

so i mean i suppose i’ve covered off a few different scenarios there are a few different kinetic threats and threats to concrete structures what do you tend to find that you’re combating out there in the market from what from I suppose from a design perspective as a consultancy mainly corrosion of reinforcement yeah that’s all come across yeah whether that yeah a lot of reasons why that happens but yeah generally that falls spawning and then yeah just yeah you run into problems yeah those feet now do you do get approached from it from your clients et cetera from a rehabilitation side more or prevented if the one day or or there was a combination of both sort of mum and dads i don’t know how to do competitive stuff yeah i just want it fixed yeah so i guess we’ll try and incorporate it in our design for new builds and all the actions and editions and things like that but yeah in terms of stuff that’s already existing but no idea yeah yeah okay yeah that’s right you’ll see a bit of spawning somewhere or not i mean for example i had to deal with a client who had uh uh older elder couple from sydney and they’re coming up to their investment a couple of investment properties up in brisbane and it was an older product property around about auger and yeah you know concrete veranda thing you know spalling there or i need it fixed when i’m almost doing the dinner doing a run around and you’re right yeah people really just don’t know it’s not as if it’s not that these aren’t the type of situations but you can just pop into bunnings and get bit of advice because they generally speaking don’t know how to address it but it is key that you know as i say there’s a lot of it out there as i say that’s in the smaller scale residential as opposed to when you just need to look around i suppose i suppose the gold coast is an obvious place where they’ve got that but up and even around the sunshine course it’s a ticking time bomb up there around the kings beach etcetera and columbus or all the property so it’s a it’s an expanding as you see because we have expansive forces concrete spawn in the markets expanding as well so yeah so i suppose what we’ll do now is we’ll look at how we can address some of these issues by looking at the use of Xypex crystalline technology and introducing it into the concrete so we’ve got a couple of different ways of introducing in into concrete one is up front as an admixture into new concrete two retrospectively we can add that into existing concrete and that can be new or old so you can imagine if you went and did a concrete pouring you had an issue you can fix some of the issues with the retrospective coating or one is you cannot lift an existing structure and then to a three sorry we’ve got a it can have a specialist they’re gonna repair motors and repair scenarios that can address a good number of situations one of the key things i suppose you’ll see up there kind of green tag our products are environmentally friendly and from our organization from manufacturing production and the actual materials itself that are contained in it we do have a gold plus rating now that rating itself is the highest rating you can get because you’ve got cement in your product we’ve got we’ve a very small portion of a gp and a product because we’ve got a lot you can’t get platinum of whatever the rating is but it does mean then if you do do a design or something you can you know have some level of green certification to it no you’ve done very well listening to scottish accent i appreciate that uh what we’ll do is going to put on a very very brief uh video here now this is a Canadian accent you get it’s from a painting company in canada so I’ll just press play on this however upon close examination we see that concrete is in fact a porous material containing capillary tracts micro cracks and sometimes macro cracks

this is a magnified view of a capillary tract in the concrete note that the walls of the capillary are lined with the byproducts of cement hydration and unhydrated cement particles when concrete is wet the capillary tracts become saturated with water

calcium hydroxide and other soluble by-products of cement hydration dissolve in the capillary water while unhydrated cement and other non-soluble materials remain on the walls for existing concrete structures the Xypex crystalline technology is applied as a coating to the concrete surface

when the highly concentrated Xypex coating comes into contact with the capillary water a chemical differential is created

driven by this chemical differential the diffusion of Xypex reactive ingredients into the capillary begins the catalytic reaction between the Xypex chemicals and the byproducts of cement hydration and unhydrated cement particles starts near the concrete surface forming insoluble crystals in the capillary tract

crystalline growth continues to develop and mature as the diffusion front progresses deeper into the concrete the Xypex crystalline technology can also be applied as an admixture to the concrete at the time of batching in this case the Xypex active ingredients are evenly dispersed throughout the cement matrix with slightly higher concentrations in the capillary water

whether as a coating or admixture the capillary cavity will become filled and waterproof by the Xypex crystalline formation Xypex active ingredients and some byproducts of cement hydration remain locked in the crystalline formation

in this way Xypex treated concrete is permanently waterproof even against extreme hydrostatic pressure and Xypex will reactivate whenever water is present

all right so that gives you i suppose a little bit of an animation uh on how it works because it’s always i think very good to visualize things in pictures uh now I know we had a zoomed in kind of capillary track there and the hose so there’s you know small lab and apart from that you know it’s representative now what we do have i suppose is some with the laboratories and things where you’ve got sem slides etc so this taking out the kind of animation realms this is now into what they call five thousand scandal electronic magnetoscopic aching images we’ve got here so just to kind of show you the kind of differences so what we’ve got here this would be your cubic and rhombic kind of unhydrated particles hydration process which normally sit dormant there within an untreated concrete element now with the introduction as Xypex crystalline technology as it mentions the crystals form within the micropore structure of concrete and essentially forms within the matrix to concrete what happens is we start to fill all these kind of voids and capillary tracks etc up that’s all by this reaction with the byproducts of the remediation process now moisture is the key component to it or water is and as you see when it’s going through the hydration process and cooling et cetera that’s when it starts to take place so typically speaking this would be the initiation as you can see from these rhombic particles you start to get kind of insoluble crystal growth now that takes place really within your one to kind of seven day period and then what you start to get is a real kind of dense interconnected pouring capillaries with the crystalline maturity within 21 to 28 days within the concrete structure the key thing is there as it says they’re non-soluble crystalline from personal information I’m not sure you picked up an animation it remains there locked in the concrete and is permanent there for the life of the structure so it’s a permanent treatment for concrete which is you know gives some real value to the projects so it’s not like something that needs a reapplication process et cetera or a re-treatment. It is purely there and done during the time it’s permanently locked in.

What we’re faced with i suppose as modern day concrete and modern day practices out there so all their design for what would be perceived as making concrete more workable and making concrete more durable also making it more cost effective cost efficient and there’s a variety of different reasons uh why you’ve seen like the introduction of fly ash flies was introduced predominantly to deal with issues of what we mentioned in the previous slide of aar and asr which effectively combats that threat but what it also does is allow you to have a slightly more slightly cheaper and more environmental friendly concrete because it’s a recycled product that’s used in there you’ve also seen more recently especially a lot of the higher strength mixes the introduction of slag and also the likes of your skin of silica fumes so the key thing i suppose with Xypex ipex from an administrator perspective is the ability to know if you work within these types of mixes or not the good news is we’ve done extensive kind of testing and we do work well and have a positive reaction with all these supplementary cementitious materials we do work in conjunction with the four main concrete suppliers as you can imagine you see you’ve got your hanson heidelberg group you get boro you’ve got wholesome and see the likes if you can adelaide writing when you go a bit further afield uh we do also work with all your you kind of more regional companies you’re more localized independents as well uh but you know companies like your wagonals and and can advance those etcetera were very comfortable with there i suppose the other thing though I should mention before is making it place but to make making well compacted and walkable concrete means you do need to use other chemical admixtures so that can be a combination a place of wonder did you see if separate all those things or you know water reduces super plasticizers you know if you’re dealing with like cold rooms and things and you get things like alien trains and the other thing i suppose which we get asked a lot especially when you look at the the kind of residential sector and the commercial side of things and even some of your suppose some of your landscape style aesthetic kind of civil projects is can we be used in conjunction with things like colored oxides and the likes the good news is we can and we’ve got a kind of proven track record for it as well the product itself from an admixture’s perspective has been extensively tested and used and what you’ll tend to see on most documentations is normally no chemical admixture can be used unless it meets as14 17 8.1 uh standard so we’ve been through all that kind of testing and we we meet the requirements that see it as a special purpose a normal setting admixture so we don’t really have any any any negative effect on either the plastic or the hardened state of concrete only positive effects now those positive effects i’m going to quickly kind of summarize now in

in a couple of slides a lot of this was covered in the animation but it just kind of helps kind of reinforce what you’re looking looking for there so i had mentioned it before had it you did heat it in the animation but the zeitge crystal information we all walked in there within the integral matrix of the concrete and the key is it is there permanently for it so as you know probably when you maybe you may or may not have done some kind of testing concrete there’s always a little bit of residual moisture sets within the concrete so the question sometimes is directed to me well you know surely then it said you know the crystals would react and there wouldn’t be any more crystals to react if you used up all moisture but essentially we want to use up the free available moisture in the reaction of the byproducts as many as it’s available at that time however it shouldn’t be any fuller moisture ingress into the concrete it does have the ability to reactivate again with it within within the concrete and provide the fuller growth of those crystals hence the reasons it reactivates from the pro or now this is quite a key one here increase both early and later age strength of concrete so we do exhibit that and and independent a lot of that’s all representative of the concrete mixes itself where we’re but against those mixes we do we do show uh improvements in that now depending on the concrete mix that can vary really anywhere from about 10 to 20 percent okay so if you imagine you’ve maybe got off 32 mpa concrete we would see probably see a better early and later date strength in region off near the 20 when you may be dealing with a 40 or a 50 mpa concrete we’re probably seeing an improvement strength in need of the 10 as opposed to the difference

increased durability and through the improved permeability or decreased permeability of the concrete so essentially if we can stop the moisture in the concrete you can control the amount of you know of harmful substances to get into the attacker one of the other things and key components of the Xypex crystalline technology is its ability to self-heal static cracks up to 0.4 millimetres wide now just to show you here we do like a couple of giveaways and these are hot off the press but uh you got a couple of crack gauges for you

it’s not all painful today but essentially so Xypex will seal static cracks up to 0.4mm if you hold that all point four mil but that point four millimetres is a relatively big crack when you look at it when you see on a slab a new concrete slab and it certainly is out without with tolerance a typical kind of main roads project would get concerns anything above 0.2 millimetres so we cover more than that with that one of the things we do have what we do have testing is we have we have shown to sell fuel cracks above 0.4 mil I think we’ve got a certain test report which shows we’ve healed self-fuel crack up to one well under our ahead of pressure after 70 days but ultimately we guarantee uh with specific project specific etc that it’s going to be 0.4 ml similar to the increased uh early in later day strength we do exhibit improvements in low drying shrinkage uh which assists with once again with the finish of the concrete highly resistant to aggressive chemicals now consistent chemical range with phd to learn and then you can handle splash or intermittent uh 2 and 12. now you’ve always got to be careful when you talk about splash and intermittent because a lot of that depends on where the project is so you know an intermittent you know would mean you know you can’t get after 24 hours or something to clean it up but a lot of that would be contained within you know project scope etc before they’d be classified so it won’t be in an 84 but consistently 3h11 as you’ve seen pathetic in sulfate attack ar adf

when we’re talking about just kind of some great structures and kind of tanking situations etc so in-ground kind of pits kind of basement walls we can be effective within within shock crete as well but the key here is you know we are resistant to extreme hydrostatic pressure so with the admixture the the capabilities of the product’s been tested up to about 106.9 meter head of pressure uh and why that that stopped there was a recently due to the capabilities of apparatus material that was used on a particular test and as a retrospective coating it’s been tested to about 121 metres ahead of pressure now we’re going to touch in this chloride protection and marine environments on a fuel test in a minute but we have are able to show extension to life in the more aggressive marine areas which would be in your c2s or you know the splash zone but you get that heavy wetting and drying cycle we do reduce the rate of carbonation so essentially as an ad mix you essentially eliminate it as a coating we we can reduce the so for a structure that’s already in service we can reduce the rate of that carbonation by so we’re almost about 35 to 40 percent uh from the from the information we’ve got so many areas where you probably get car threat carbonation would be typically things like you know high density residential areas and also things like car parks structures etc where you’ve got as i say you might have carbon monoxide issues and you’ve got a bit of oxygen but it’s more of when you’ve got the moisture to come combining with it all together so you if you really get your problem so we get involved in a lot of car park especially rooftop car park projects etc cetera one other interesting thing we came across the law the other week was in in good traffic car parks and especially in the basement areas was actually noise containment and acoustic issues so as you can imagine for you turning et cetera on a normal concrete you don’t get the same squeaks that you would do off of kind of a more robust kind of paint on a membrane style product there’s just something that was uh throughout there as well heat resistant consisting minus 32 plus 130 degrees we also can cause exposure to over a thousand degrees celsius and to like minus 160 something degrees once again intermittent but consistently a minus 32 to plus 130. we get involved in quite a lot of the

they can have more than the abattoir style product project just now where there’s been a methodology change whether you go to what they call quick chill rooms sort of snapshot so you know I mentioned before but kind of what I think we did touch a little bit and freeze though so you think people have a face or you know a problem with it in Queensland uh well not in normal structures you don’t but in the certain project projects you do especially some of those so yeah very effective in that so that’s why we get used there suppose when you’re looking in nsp you’ve got issues with you know exposure to the uv etc and rooftop areas etc one of the key things the product uh product range is not affected by likes of humidity and UV and kind of oxidization

we do work within the concrete so you don’t have issues that you get with typical kind of physical barrier products that you can get now we did touch earlier on good concrete practice and modern day methodologies and things like that so what you’ve now seen is and it’s what is really is a widespread adoption of your curing compounds your wax release agents etc all that now one of the issues you tend to find now with these kind of barrier products or for example surface coatings and membranes is there needs to be an awful lot of attention detail put into surface preparation of those to make sure you get consistent adhesion and don’t have any delamination issues one of the main reasons why you do failures and a lot of software supplied products is because they haven’t managed to get all the oils and latents and curing compounds etc out of the concrete prior to those applications and as I say if you put a widespread membrane on something you get a small print prick in a bubble somewhere before you know what you get you really don’t know where the potential problem could really be on some of those structures

key here is as4020 certified so we can be using contact with drinking water so we’re doing an almost minute walk within the water authority market so both in new structures and also rehabilitated projects but when you’re dealing with i suppose some commercial and residential projects you do have your kind of water tanks sometimes contained in buildings and then sometimes i think under the queue flood or whatever that code is you need to have us our storm containment tanks and things so the good news is we don’t have any detrimental effect to to water not that you want to drink the storm water essentially one of these buildings but uh yeah it just means any discharge eventually it’s not going to be any detrimental to aspects to you know issues yeah i mean this list could be yeah i mean you know yourself in many areas hungry can be used i mean so you can go on and on and on but that kind of summarizes where we could we couldn’t see ourselves being used so in your typical commercial kind of stroke residential projects you know in that basement area which is normally pretty critical uh and we do we normally start off with lift bits believe it or not because that’s money bang for money per square meter is probably most expensive when you’re in the building they normally go to all three systems just to make sure they get it right but from there as i say you walk you can water yourself around in the basement and the ground and like in ground slab the wall structures and then depending on podium’s roofs and kind of plant slabs as mentioned the watering supermarket tunnels and subways i mean james himself he’s been with zypex now just over a year but he’s got a lot of experience within the tunnel sector uh fortunately as i said when i came on board was ipex i saw the the back end of climb seven and then i’ve seen airport one kind legacy way more recently i’m involved with the the tunnel project at brisbane airport so i’ve got a bit of exposure to that environment but you’re still dealing with similar situations really it’s all you’re turning we’ve got a problem and we address that problem and make sure we get we get the right dose rates et cetera and what within the concrete to achieve the things like 100 year design life which is predominant now in a lot of us okay

now we mentioned that earlier about marine structures I’ll quickly just uh give you through a kind of case study so I did mention we’re very good at having lots of testing available different environmental exposure classifications etc all around the world

These two case studies came up but both are in Australia which would be good to know uh the first one is from an admixture and then in an in a c2 c2 zone and what this is just to give you is is give you a bit of insight into the type of testing that gets done and it shows you the same performance you gave us in the cut in a concrete

now when both these tests were done as it says they’re just under 20 years worth of in service in that uh c2 classification the title splash zone

please test panels down at coronal colonel marina our name of good say precast concrete slabs then it will sell swarf geelong so typically speaking what you well what i will say here is both tests here were actually undertaken by by the clients with independent and independently verified information so i’ll stress that just now on both cases you know obviously we’ve gone in there and they’ve initially done a visual inspection which is not how most of these things start uh one of the key things was there there was no obvious signs of any cracking and no rust stains and no issue we covered spoiling now normally what that tends to mean is it on the surface it appears the concrete is in good condition but as we know is really what is happening below the surface is and more importantly around about how the rebar his eyes tracking determines how you can predict the residual service life of a concrete structure so what this thing led to was doing a bit more investigative work so what they’ve done here is they’ve actually done some destructive testing here and they’ve gone and taken some core samples from both structures

there we go and then from that they’ve gone and done some chloride profiling of those and from the chloride profile they do half cell potential testing etc and then apply it to a calculation which is called fixed second law which is the go-to equation for predicting residual service life and then they come up with with the figure of what they predict will be the corrosion-free service life of the structure so we’ll start with the graph here uh now what I will say here is was both structures were designed for 50 years and under the Australian codes should boast you about 50 ml cover okay now one of the issues they had in the granola marina was design constraints in relation to the structure meant they had to go 40 mil which meant the engineer had to come up with a methodology, uh to sign off to allow him to design for the 50-year design life so that was one of the reasons why they adopted Xypex crystalline technology in that particular structure now

as you can see in that initial 10 mil you’ve seen you’ve seen a little bit of chloride ingress in there and a chloride iron content within the concrete now that essentially would be what we seed is your your initial kind of skin of the concrete so that’s your your surface this is what Xypex doesn’t do is have any negative impact essentially on the surface profile or texture of the actual concrete itself but as you see when you get into the the main concrete element itself you’re getting the negligible readings then really after 20 years that that’s probably not so bad but it’s good looking at these things in the chat it’s fine but what does it actually mean to to the client so as i mentioned when they do do the calculation and take these results we’ll put all in there action on the marina after 19 years and 40 mil cover the corrosion free service life forecasted is 129 years alice ellsworth they just just choose the nature destruction the testing that was done they took a wider range of samples and that averaged their 164 after 90 and that’s i must stress that after 19 years so what what they decided to do after that was do a little bit of cross coloration back to a previous lab test that had been done just to see well how does that relate to what we had previously kind of told the market so back in 2004 they engaged the university of new south wales to do some testing on on some high performance concrete so it’s 40 mpa 38 slide concrete so on that experiment as i say just for a normal 40 mp 30 sly concrete the projected corrosion free service life would be something like 42 years now that doesn’t mean the structure is going to fall to bits it just means that’s when you get the initial onset of corrosion that take place with addition as ipex admix in this controlled lab environment they had the forecast there of 147 years so when you then go back uh and cross colorado we really already be able to clearly exhibit both in the field or in a lab that you get 100 years extension service life in that type of environment so comparing that to the case study in granola marina so your 19 years and add your 129 onto 140 years so once again that almost identical to your your test environment

but bearing in mind that’s it reduce cover when you actually put it into context with the australian code and the appropriate cover you’re actually seeing that type of extension so you’re looking at 130 years worth of extension seriously nab one of the first times i presented this so well that’s okay there’ll be nothing else down at granola marina apart from your pontoon in a few years there were nothing else there but as i say that just lets you see the type of performance we’re doing and we do spend a lot of time investigating it now we do have the testing itself is is readily readily available on on our web page and we do have all the testing it can it can be drawn out we do have documents which summarize a lot of testing including these type of results but the things we mentioned again about sulfate attack chemical attack exposure to sulfuric acid et cetera we’ve got all those those types of things they test test well and truly available and as i said what we do like to do is work collaboratively with engineers to achieve the desired outcome for the client and the project

yeah there you go just shows you uh they’re just a bit of a shock tactic uh thing i suppose but essentially what this is it’s these are cylinders concrete cylinders have been soaked in a i think it’s a 5 sulfuric acid solution as you say for 70 days that structure there has nine times more mass than that has after the 70 days uh so hence the reason why we are using a lot of a lot of chemical projects and in a lot of sewer projects enclosed so becomes a different thing with your direct microbial attack but certainly in the in areas where you’ve got that chemical attack where we use quake we don’t know what with the likes of your Incitec pivots and a lot of your ammonium nitrate facilities and the likes of your Orica etc right so what that does is that’s just that it’s about warranty stuff there

is this going

there we go so from crystal information to sustainable concrete but essentially you can make an easy concrete you know it’s one of your number one uh building materials user in the world now and as you say what you can do with concrete now from a design perspective people you can achieve design in concrete without kind of compromise i suppose so what we’re saying there is you by introducing crystalline information into concrete you reduce porosity and cracks within the concrete what you can then do with the co that is you restrict and reduce diffusion of liquids and gases in with that durability performance increases which means the service expected service life increases which means long term you’ve got reduced cost environmental impact so even from an asset owner’s perspective if you can reduce a maintenance cost to them for having to maybe reapply a roof membrane or over the life of the structure it’s got quite a decent uh long term saving to the client and it means it’s something they don’t need to program into an ongoing maintenance schedule which you get as I said we work with a lot within within certainly a lot within the council and the asset owners in there maintain the scheduling and planning environments and as I say with the introduction I suppose the likes have been modelling they’re trying to get more of those type of figures put in where they can put you know the long long-term coursing is a lot but still in it and it’s infancy as far as that as you can see i’ve been using them for all things but yeah we’re working working in conjunction with a few guys in projects like that so i suppose i’ll throw it out there if you get any any kind of queries or any questions

yeah i’ve got a couple yep um i guess we’re always trying to reduce you know required cover and usually we do that by increasing the strength of the concrete itself yeah whoever did the the canelo one obviously have reduced to 41.50 with whatever concrete um is there some sort of testing or some sort of data on how to go about reducing the coverage reinforcement you know in terms of AS3600 to still comply yeah that’s to see that that becomes a challenge i think because ultimately and it makes good good sense to your questions one that does get thrown up quite a lot is ultimately from a designer’s perspective from engineers really you’re the ones who either need to design to the code or override the code if you can do with the user but we would certainly be able to support you with information that may be able to get you over that line but it’s where they’ll you know every cross it but yeah we do ask that trust me we get asked all the time i was involved in in a project where in the particular area 90 oh yeah some was about let’s say 90 of these in ground pits where b2 classification due to the other zone was classified c2 and it was a national change in cost of these two pits and also on cover so from the pre-cast perspective all of a sudden he hadn’t changed molds and everything else it was a real

appetite should we call it to let us use an introduction but i’d make sure now everyone agreed it was a good idea the asset owner said that it’s fine we’re happy with it they’re a third-party superintendent consultant say that’s fantastic that’s great just need to get make sure you get the sign-off for it but there then was really the problem was you had everyone wanting to do it but then getting someone to actually sign off on it it was difficult we certainly came up with design statements to say yeah we would we would predict based on what you’ve got there that the we would expect to see this environment and you’ll be able to meet but once again it was just just a timing thing i think with some of the yeah and the other thing so you’re saying that you’re reducing permeability of the concrete itself in terms of sort of and you’re saying that it’s working at a you know 100 whatever head of pressure but i mean would you want to say if you’re putting it into a pool or something and you have you know as ifx in your admixture would you then be able to provide a warranty for the builder who is putting that into

indoor pools especially in higher-end housing or when you’ve got as you say pools on decks and you’ve got sometimes with movie rooms and all sorts yeah we do warrant these types of things, not a problem no they can just put this admixture i mean yeah yeah I’ll just can I do it yeah just job it’s very very simple to be fair now as I mentioned we work with all the major concrete companies but this just summarizes it to be fair here right so basically what can happen is so when we deal typically in a commercial residential structure and in Queensland, this thing works about here the queen’s like the QBCC form 16. so what that is as we know it is it’s a licensed trade who carries out the walk and inspects the box and says it’s fit for purpose

yeah yeah so what we’ve got is we’ve got fully fully trained and approved applicators who do plant qa and site qa and what they do is make sure that everything goes to planet earth yeah it comes in when you pull the concrete yeah and what that means is the issue at the form of 16 depending on the nature of the job and what the client’s looking for because something the client just wants that that’s but most jobs i think we normally issue both and we warrant the issue we issue the warranty as a manufacturer is there a minimum thickness that you need for those effects to work or is you know if you’re using hey i think sort of pulled or something for whatever reason now generally speaking we should we should be fine we’ve been involved in i mean i think we’ll do it yeah in certain projects we we’ve seen wall thicknesses and all that i don’t know doing one just now in a short creek wall i think you’re somewhere between maybe 60 or 70 mil or something so yeah if you’re talking about typical wall thicknesses maybe 100 yeah 150 mil you want it was an issue at all telling that and i’d say we get used in a lot a lot a lot of kind of pool projects and as i say when you’re dealing with a lot of the rate suppose the higher end residential projects but they’re working in smaller plots and they used to be on this so you can incorporate a pool within that structure but you still use underneath so yeah but no issues at all with kind of warranties and the likes there as i mentioned before we do like to engage one with i suppose the design engineers on the job but more importantly you need to have the collaboration supposed with the builder as well yeah yeah and you know they they you know you know there’s commercial reality setting but the commercial reality is saying well wait a minute you know where there’s the risk here uh you know you know you might save a couple of dollars here but do you actually ever save a couple of dollars really because they mean they’re tied to projects and things so yeah we we don’t mind issuing warranties now i think across the board i think the qbcc form 16 i think it’s a standard kind of seven year thing out there so we tend to go in line with the standard bit of a builder or a client is specifically wanting a longer term warranty that can be that can be assessed by your technical team and we do issue them for longer than that it’s all depends on on the actual project itself but once again it’s just a bit engaging with us during the nature of that like for example i’m working a project just now they’re doing the

budget of the Gregory Terrace project they get the new amount sign building so the building over the the the swimming pool down below and I think it’s a three-level structure then you’re gonna have a child care facility and all that so they’re doing a huge kind of open-air roof deck and I think this is gonna half of it’s gonna be conveniently reinforced or half’s gonna be pt everyone’s a bit nervous but it has been designed like a bridge structure I’m saying so well I’ve seen a few pressures between the few issues it should be okay but yeah so we’ve already something pre-arranged for that for 20 years but that was done way back at the design stage to get everything through the workability of the concrete any different yeah well when we put up the the 14.78.1 normal setting admixture when you zoom into the details what we tend to see is

a a slight set extension time of between 45 to 60 minutes now what that means is you get improved walkability of the concrete so one of the comments you tend to get as well will make it a bit more creamy and lovely so people get a lot of time with it but it just depends on one what what time of year you’re working how well organized the concrete poles been because sometimes these guys just won’t walk on over as quickly as possible they’re not really worried about you know how they finish the concrete is or all the rest of it so once again you just need the whole party path is involved in a larger project we do like to have a pre-box or or be on or be asked to be a people meeting just so that we can address some of these some of these issues but we do like to look at using things like aliphatic alcohol if required or at least they’ve got it on site uh and definitely curing compounds very rarely do they does anyone have to afford the time to do seven days wet curing because you know it’s like before you know it turn your back they’re already loading up the slab it’s quite incredible so yeah we’re uh we’re happy with that yeah that’s what i’ve got to do quite well but as you say we do we do almost a minute walk with with concrete companies and kind of all the builders around there and i say you know from the the larger scale civil projects to as i say the smaller kind of residential projects but i find equally the more equal is enjoyable to be fair because some of them have all got their own unique kind of challenges and i’m doing a doing quite an interesting one just now up at noosa right at park roads it’s right beside the national park they’ve got ah it’s just an all-foam colored concrete kind of house essentially but yeah a bit brutalist to a certain degree but it’s uh you’ve got a huge can to leave a pool so essentially the pool just can’t even say he can’t leave us over the car but he’s got that kind of impression they just so yeah it’s been quite an interesting interesting one there but something i don’t know what you’ve experienced because it seems a bit money around just having some of the higher end i don’t know they might always spend money but there’s a lot of money in high-end housing just now so you certainly seen that you’ve got your pockets typically so we do a lot of work down at buying if you can imagine and then i’ll put gonna know so that top end is a bit poor some of the money that’s getting spent you think and some of these aren’t even for permanent residences though for occasional vocational weekend flying home would you think oh my goodness

so just uh

there you go just kind of summarize it like any organization you use better social media we saw that we are on linkedin you can follow us we tend to update that every 18 months it’s not that we’re not like frequently but yeah we we occasionally post things on linkedin any any kind of value valuable kind of products or updates but well the key thing is we are supporting performance-based specifications uh and yeah we’re likely to engage there but the key thing for myself is we we we can and we do extend the life of concrete assets but the driving thing here is reducing future kind of maintenance costs so as i’ve mentioned it doesn’t matter whether you’re a council who wants to keep the cost down or you’re a homeowner or you’re a property developer you really don’t want to be having your oil property developer you have to make yourself an asset on whatever else you still don’t want to have you know maintenance costs in an initial period saying that you need to go back and keep fixing which becomes painful especially the people in those in those kind of buildings uh and as i say we do work with other organizations like you know your west farmers uh they can aldi group in the lakes for a lot of their kind of structures and things as well

you

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