Warm concrete: composition, characteristics, application, prices

Surely you've heard about such material aspolystyrene concrete. A more adapted name is warm concrete. We learn more about its composition, characteristics, and its application, advantages and disadvantages.

Warm concrete - what is it?

Warm (polystyrene concrete) concrete is a kind of concreteMixtures with foamed polystyrene pellets that improve both the strength and thermal characteristics of the material. Also, warm concrete is a kind of this material containing a number of additives that do not allow it to freeze at minus temperatures from the manufacturing process right up to the application itself.

The components of polystyrene concrete ensure the uselessness in additional insulation of the room. The composition of warm concrete is as follows:

Portland cement.
Water.
Foamed polystyrene (expanded polystyrene, the price of which is relatively low) in granules.
The resin is wood-saponified (air-entraining inclusion).

The price of expanded polystyrene varies between 900-1200 rubles per 5 m² (a set of several plates). Why is its inclusion in the concrete is not costly.

Application of the material

The traditional application of warm concrete is as follows:

Construction of apartment houses.
Monolithic building construction.
Sound and heat insulation of floors, ceilings, walls and slabs.
Warming of buildings and structures.

Also, the material is successfully used as a non-standard solution for:

Filling of spaces:
- Construction of fences, fences.
- Filling the internal cavity grillage.
- Filling the enclosing structure in the form of the walls of the house.
Reducing weight on any structure:
- When building swimming pools.
- When arranging the floors of floating houses.
- When using a slab of profiled sheeting carrying a load as an overlap, it is filled from the inside with polystyrene concrete.
- In cases where the hygroscopicity of the material is required (does not crack under the pressure of linear loads).
- When it is necessary to equip the slope-forming floor in the floating structure, which helps reduce the overall load on the entire structure.

The most widely used in construction are concrete blocks with a density of 200-600 kg / m³. From this characteristic the sphere of their use directly depends:

450-600 - fencing and load-bearing structures in low-rise buildings.
400-600 - external bearing walls in low-rise construction.
300-350 - curtain walls.
200-300 - are used only in the role of thermal insulation material.

Material Advantages

Let's list the main advantages of warm concrete:

Sound-insulating and heat-insulating qualitiesthe material is several times higher than that of ordinary concrete. This allows you not to engage in additional insulation with mineral wool, foam glass, foam and so on.
Warm concrete is a very economical material for the reason that it performs several functions at once.
Polystyrene concrete has a mass several times smaller than ordinary concrete, which greatly facilitates loading / unloading, transportation.
The mass load of a structure from warm concrete is also less than the standard one, which reduces the cost of building a foundation.
The ease of processing material can be compared with wood: it is easy to saw, drill, hammer into it nails.
Ecologically clean material - consists of water, concrete and expanded polystyrene.
The water absorption of the material is the average between foam concrete and ordinary concrete.
From the previous paragraph comes one more advantage - high frost resistance.
Low level of vapor permeability.

Disadvantages of polystyrene concrete

The material also has a number of disadvantages:

The fastening materials in its thickness are fragile.
The low density of the material affects the quality of the installation of windows and doors - with time they begin to loosen up.
Valuable properties of the material depend on the quality of its base - concrete.
The plaster does not adhere well to warm concrete, which makes it necessary to prepare the surface before plastering.
On shrinkage three times overtakes both foam and aerated concrete - 1 mm / m.
Blocks of material are not considered combustible, but togetherso they are not fire resistant. This means that under the influence of high temperatures the polystyrene pellets burst, which in future leads to a loss of thermal insulation properties.

We have analyzed the main characteristics of one of themodern materials - warm concrete with the addition of polystyrene beads. Like all other concrete mixtures, it is endowed with a lot of advantages and disadvantages.

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