Browsing by Author "Moyo, P"

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    Assessing the age at cracking of concrete repair mortars
    (2012) Chilwesa, Masuzyo; Beushausen, Hans-Dieter; Moyo, P
    The amount of concrete infrastructure needing repair and rehabilitation is increasing worldwide. The bonded overlay technique, which involves removal- of a damaged concrete layer on an existing concrete base (substrate) and replacing it with a new layer is one of the most widely used techniques. Due to thermal and hygral differences in the two composites, differential shrinkage occurs. This leads to overlay shrinkage restraint by the relatively mature substrate. Restrained shrinkage in bonded overlays can cause stress build up and may result in cracking. Cracking due to restrained deformation is a major problem as it may lead to durability concerns. Overlay resistance to crack initiation, development and propagation depends on a number of time-dependent properties of the concrete. To be able to predict the onset of cracking requires knowledge of the different material properties and how they interact with each other. In this study, an investigation was carried out on whether the performance with respect to cracking of concrete overlays can be adequately predicted from tests such as ring test, free shrinkage strain, tensile strength test, tensile relaxation and elastic modulus. Five concrete mortar types i.e. three commercially available mortars and two laboratory mixed mortars with water-tocement ratio (w/c) = 0.45 and w/c = 0.6 were used in the ring test and material property tests. The influence of curing on the crack resistance of overlays was also investigated. An analytical madel for predicting age at cracking in bonded overlays based upon time-development of overlay material properties and the superposition principle was developed. Results from the model were compared with results from the ring test. Results indicate that crack resistance of repair mortars depends upon the combined influence of the different material properties. In particular tensile stress relaxation appears to have a large influence. Curing was observed to delay the onset of cracking. Results also indicate that although the ring test will give the correct order of cracking, it will not give the actual age at cracking when assessing materials for crack resistance.
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    Open Access
    Cradle-to-gate environmental impacts of the concrete industry in South Africa
    (2013) Muigai, R; Alexander, M G; Moyo, P
    The objective of the paper is to provide an understanding of the South African concrete industry's environmental burden in terms of natural resource consumption and carbon dioxide equivalent emissions (CO2-e). The review covers current practices in the concrete construction field in South Africa (SA) and their implications for the environment. Elaboration in terms of detail and quantification is given for the environmental burden generated during the manufacture of raw materials for concrete and their transportation to site. Four-year average (2005-2008) data is provided for resources consumed and wastes emitted during the quarrying and manufacture of raw materials for concrete. Carbon dioxide-equivalent emissions data per unit of material produced was obtained from the InEnergy Report produced for the Cement and Concrete Institute (C&CI) of South Africa. The study determined that, on average, 39.7 Mt of raw materials are consumed per year and 4.92 x 109 kg CO2-e emissions are emitted per year to produce cement and aggregates for concrete production in South Africa.
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    Dynamic performance of pre-cast prestressed beams – cast in-situ slab composite bridges
    (2013) Leo, Emmanuel; Moyo, P; Beushausen, H. D
    Most bridge management systems still rely on visual inspections for condition assessment of bridges; this means that damage in inaccessible parts of the structure such as shear connectors in concrete composite bridges remain undetected until catastrophic failure occurs. Localized non-destructive techniques such as ultrasonic techniques, radar method, impact testing, magnetic based methods and proof load tests are limited to small areas, time consuming and require prior knowledge of the damaged zone. These limitations can be overcome by using dynamics-based techniques. The main objective of this work is to investigate experimentally the effectiveness of dynamics-based techniques in assessing the condition of shear connectors in concrete composite bridges consisting of pre-cast prestressed beams and a cast in-situ slab based on measurements taken from the surface of the accessible deck slab. In this research, shear links of 8mm bars extended from beam to the slab are used to stimulate shear connectors in real bridges. The experimental work involved building five concrete composite beams each with different number of shear connectors. The testing procedure consisted of measuring the dynamic properties in both the undamaged and damaged beams. Damage was introduced by accelerating corrosion to a group of shear connectors near the supports in each composite beam. Push-off test was conducted in order to determine the shear capacity of the shear connectors in both undamaged and damaged state. The modal tests were successfully executed and from the modal analysis results it was observed that a beam with large number of shear connectors produce high frequencies and high amplitudes of frequency response functions (FRFs) compared to the one with less number of shear connectors. After the shear connectors were damaged all beams showed similar results. In the FRFs, the frequency peaks shifted to the left and the peaks amplitudes changed, the natural frequencies generally dropped indicating the existence of damage. In an attempt to locate regions with damaged shear connectors, the Coordinate Modal Assurance Criteria (COMAC), change of flexibility, change of curvature and strain energy method were used. All methods showed positive and negative results. The change of flexibility method showed minimum negative results compared to other methods in locating regions with damaged shear connectors. Generally, Results show that dynamics-based techniques can be used to detect and localize regions with damaged shear connectors in pre-cast prestressed beams - cast in-situ slab composite bridges by only taking vibration measurements from the surface of the accessible deck slab.