As we mentioned before, the Maturix system allows you to follow the temperature and strength development in real-time. This will help you to keep your project plan, make a more efficient use of resources, ensure good concrete quality and fulfil the documentation and quality assurance requirements. Moreover, it will allow you to take proactive decisions based on data instead of using data passively.
For example, one of our clients experienced that one day, while being at home during the weekend, there was a sudden drop in temperature in his concrete. He asked a colleague to check the job site and found that one of the concrete covers had flown away. Luckly, it was not too late so the cover was placed back and the concrete cured successfully. The situation could have been disastrous, the concrete could have frozen (the project was located in Norway) causing innumerable delays to the rest of the project and a lot of added stress. Instead, thanks to the remote access to the temperature data from a smartphone, the client could solve the issue easily and fast.
When working on a project, there are many things that can go wrong. The heating or cooling equipment might break, the covers might blow away or the concrete may cure slower than expected. This added to the fact that many times the project site is far from other infrastructures makes it challenging to keep an eye on everything. You may be home on the weekend hoping that your concrete is doing fine.
With Maturix In-situ, you could be home and simply check on your phone how the cast is doing at any time. Moreover, you can also set alarms to get notified if the temperature drops or exceeds certain values, if the strength is reached or if there is data coming in. Say goodbye to the long drives done to check if all is okay, now you can accomplish the same simply by looking at the data from your phone or laptop.
A thermal control plan is often a requirement on big scale projects and on publicly owned (infrastructure, utility buildings etc.).
Requirements might include requirements such as:
In the table below, we have compared the procedure of creating the thermal control documentation with a traditional data logger against doing it with a smart concrete sensor.
Gather Data
Extensive work of gather information, as distance from office to concrete both on job sites and precast facilities might be long
Two types of maturity sensors are available: Short-range (bluetooth, wifi etc.) and Long range (GSM, Sigfox, Lora etc.)
If true remote collection is wanted, then you have to find a long range solution like Maturix
Transfer to PC
When datalogger is brought to the office from the casted concrete data has to be transfer to a PC
This process will be done automatically.
From Raw Data to Charts
The raw temperature readings has to be upload to an excel sheet , aligned and charts made
This process will be done automatically.
From Excel to Word to PDF
Charts and data tables transferred to word and made into a PDF
This process will be done automatically.
If you want to also calculate the maturity and strength from the temperature readings, this will involve a lot of manual work and increase the risk of errors.
With Maturix, all the calculations will be done automatically. This means that you can use the temperature readings for the thermal monitoring documentation, but also for strength monitoring. Moreover, as all data the data is automatically stored and formatted in reports in the Maturix in-situ platform. These reports are ready to be exported, in PDF or another format, and printed anytime. The reports are updated every 10 minutes when new data is received and contains both data from the concrete, temperature, and the ambient humidity and KPI’s like maximum temperature, production time etc. Everything done automatically without any use of labor – this is what we call automatic reporting.
Concreting under either very cold or very hot conditions can make concreting extremely challenging. In hot weather conditions, with the temperatures rising, you might risk exceeding the maximum recommended temperature, normally set to 70°C. Having such a high temperature (often in the core) could cause your concrete to:
In low weather conditions, normally defined as three consecutive days of temperatures below 5, the curing speed is very low which means that the strength will be gained very slowly. Moreover, if the concrete falls below a certain temperature the reaction will stop completely and there may cause irreparable damage.
For these reasons, it is very important that you monitor the temperature under both hot and cold temperatures. You could do this with traditional data loggers but these can be very labour intensive and time consuming. A much better option is to use the Maturix system (composed of transmitters and an online platform) to gather your temperature, maturity and strength data, get to see it and create reports in the online platform and even invite external users to view it.
One of the new big concrete trends globally are the new green concrete mixes with a low (at least lower) carbon footprint compared to traditionally used concrete. Some of these new concrete mixes substitute part of the limestone or calcium silicate, present in normal concrete, with clay products.
The new types of concrete often face the challenges of:
The brown-ish color is often “just” an architectural/design challenge, while the reduced internal heat development from the hydration will have a significant impact on the curing process. The reduced heating can be an advantage on very big and thick castings, where you often use retarders and cooling to avoid high maximum and high-temperature variations in the cross-section. But the low heat development can also be a challenge on most castings where you need to achieve a certain early strength fast. Therefore, it is crucial to keep track of the temperature and strength development of the concrete by using sensors.