Cold Weather Concreting

Book excerpt: Concreting in cold weather requires special knowledge and skills to ensure accelerated hardening and high quality in plain- and reinforced-concrete structures. Cold Weather Concreting familiarizes concrete specialists with the characteristic features of concrete in cold weather, including the effects of frost, methods for hardening in subzero temperatures, and other challenges in cold-weather concreting. Both practical techniques and their underlying theories are covered. The book presents many methods for the thermal treatment of concrete by means of electric current--information previously available only in the Russian literature. It presents unique data in the form of diagrams, drawings, and tables, including a chart of the phase state of concretes of different strengths in the process of freezing at different temperatures, the variation of concrete strains in freezing and thawing, and a diagram of electric fields in concrete when electrodes are placed in front of stirrups.