There is a saying that all roads lead to Rome, and fact is, 5300 miles of those roads were built from concrete. From 300 B.C. to 46 A.D, the Romans used pozzuolana cement from Pozzuoli, Italy to build the Appian Way along with famous Roman structures such as the Coliseum and Pantheon. It is the Pont du Gard aqueduct structure that is in other places of Europe such as in Southern France. One more magnificient concrete buils structure is the Roman structure the Hadrian’s Wall. The use of this artificial and ancient masonry is very much similar to modern concrete. The Roman concrete has been built making use of pozzuolana (a volcanic earth) which is a combination of lime, broken stones, bricks, and tuff.

Concrete Facts

Concrete is universally the most commonly used construction material for foundations, reinforced frames for buildings, bridge decks, retaining walls, roof tiles, in-situ and precast floors. Despite many of the countries coming to the level of using in-situ paving only country that has not yet started the practice is UK. Even when concrete is the more resilient and the most inexpensive form of paving a lot of contractors and architects make use of it the least. Nevertheless ever since it has been started in UK about twenty years ago the development it it has come from a complete nil to about 100, 000 square meters every year.

Technically, a concrete structural masonry material is made by mixing broken stone or gravel with sand, cement, and water and allowing the mixture to harden into a solid mass. Cement is the typical thing that is a chemical used along with the combination of sand and stone that form the torbid items. Concrete is such a material that is most extensively used in structures and can be procured at any place. It has the capability to resist fire and can be made use of by even unskilled labourers.

With its 100-year service life, concrete conserves resources by reducing the need for reconstruction. It is made of only the easily available things such as cement and the composite mixture that is of sand, gravel and crushed stone. For the use of concrete there is no need to fell CO2 engaged trees. The land required to extract the materials needed to make concrete is only a fraction of that used to harvest forests for lumber.

Concrete Feats

The world record for the largest concrete pour in a single project is the Three Gorges Dam in Hubei Province, China. The amount of concrete used in the construction of the dam is estimated at 16 million cubic meters over 17 years. The previous record was 3.There is about 2 million cubic meters in the custody of Itaipu hydropower station in Brazil.

As per evidence the biggest constant concrete that was put in water was finished on October 18, 2010 in New Orleans, Louisiana. It was placed making use of 10,224 cubic yards of concrete that was undertaken in a 58 hour time frame with the use of two concrete pumps and two dedicated concrete batch plants.