When placing concrete and cementitious concrete repair mortars, especially in hot and dry weather, evaporation rate is one of the most critical factors to take into consideration. The evaporation rate is the rate at which moisture is being lost from the concrete or mortar surface, which affects a few elements of a concrete or repair mortar placement. If the evaporation rate is too high, water is leaving the surface too rapidly, and creates difficulty during finishing operations. Equally important is that a high evaporation rate during placement and initial curing greatly increases the likelihood of plastic shrinkage cracking in the concrete surface. Plastic shrinkage cracks leave a concrete surface vulnerable to the future intrusion of water and chlorides and leave the surface with an overall unpleasant appearance.
Evaporation
There are far too many repair options to cover them in a single email. So, we’ve picked two options for a very common issue. Look around the mill and you’re sure to see this one. A large piece of concrete cracked off the corner of a foundation. It may be on the floor or even still holding on to rebar or an anchor bolt. Here are two easy fixes for this condition that won’t take long to do.
Clean separated piece of concrete and area if came from. Make sure they are both free of dust. Then liberally apply Ultrabond 1 epoxy adhesive to the surface of the piece coating it completely. Press the piece into the area it came from. Use a couple of clamps or a piece of lumber to hold it until hardened.
Clean the area that has been exposed and saturate it with water to pre-soak the surface.
Everyone wants to repair or replace damaged foundations, but they don’t want it to take any time. Keeping the kind of schedule the owner is expecting is critical to your project. However, doing that with conventional materials and methods is basically impossible. In the past, the only option was for the owner to wait for conventional concrete to gain strength. In most cases, they can’t wait the full cure time. So, those foundations hardly ever last as long as they’d hoped.
As the contractor, you want to give your customer other options that could exceed their expectations on time and performance. You’re in luck. There are many options available for the repair and replacement for concrete that don’t require the traditional cure times you’ve had to schedule around in the past. Most of these materials are specially designed