Gilson Insights

The right Concrete Compression Testing Machine will shape the overall success of your concrete testing. In this guide, we explain the different machines available and how to determine the best option for your lab.

Increase the overall performance of your basic or manual concrete compression testing machine by upgrading to automatic operation with an Automatic Controller Retrofit. Learn more about the benefits of automatic operation and see how easy it is to install a Retrofit to your existing compression machine.

More than a century ago, Duff Abrams established a simple ratio to define the strength, quality, and workability of concrete mixtures. The water to cementitious material (w/cm) ratio is universally used in mixture design and batching, but accurate determinations for on-site acceptance of fresh concrete have remained elusive until now. The Phoenix method provides accurate and repeatable w/cm measurements in the lab or field in minutes.

If surface moisture evaporates from freshly poured concrete too quickly, the concrete surface dries out and plastic shrinkage cracking can occur. Learn how to monitor and mitigate plastic shrinkage for optimum concrete results.

The term construction materials testing sounds like a catch-all term for analyzing everything from nails to doorknobs. However, for the civil engineering industry, it has come to mean the characterization of a handful of things by using specific test methods in a construction materials testing laboratory: concrete, aggregates, asphalt, and soils. This blog will take a high-altitude view of what construction materials are, the most important properties to test for, and the right equipment to get the job done.

While Part 1 of this blog series discussed nondestructive concrete testing methods and equipment, Part 2 will cover equipment used to detect location, orientation, and corrosion of reinforcing steel, the effects of moisture, and how to document concrete quality.

Concrete slump testing is the most common test performed on fresh concrete for any application. It is a significant factor when evaluating a concrete batch's compliance with the approved mix design and an eleventh-hour check of its suitability for placement. For this post, we focus on the slump test, how to perform it properly, and the best testing equipment to use.

The two most popular types of end treatment for cylindrical concrete specimens are sulfur mortar capping and neoprene compression pads. Both have their advantages. Neoprene pads are convenient and reusable many times over. Sulfur mortar is economical when testing large numbers of cylinders, and is often the preferred end treatment for cylinders because of its long history of use. Reliable strength results and consistent display of fracture patterns are predictable and well understood. In this article, we go over the equipment and techniques used for sulfur mortar capping.

Construction aggregates are traditionally mined or extracted from natural sand and gravel deposits or geological rock formations, then further crushed and sorted into size fractions for blending. In this blog article, we discuss the tests and equipment to determine the characterization of aggregate shape properties for roads and structures.

Although Alkali-Silica Reactivity (ASR) has created problems in concrete mixtures for centuries, the mechanism was not understood and documented until the mid-1930s. ASR is now recognized as a significant cause of concrete deterioration anywhere in the world where siliceous aggregates are found. In this blog article, we discuss what ASR is, the effect it has on concrete, prevention, and the equipment to use for testing.