ECC Trivia: slump test
I spent about 3 hours with the students in the ACE-MRL lab this morning while they mixed and poured some engineered cementitious composite. I learned lots of things, but right now, I'm offering you this linguistic tidbit: slump.
In this case, slump refers not to the Hawkeye football season or some other sudden, severe decline in value but to a kind of test performed on concrete. In the slump test, fresh concrete is poured into an almost-cone, someone pulls the cone up, and then someone measures how far from the center of the cone the concrete ends up. Basically, you make a pancake of concrete and measure its radius. The results of a slump test tell you something about how "workable" the concrete is - how easily you can "place" it in a structure or form of some kind. It also tells you how cohesive that mix is.
So there you go. Today's bit of flexible concrete trivia is "slump." Pictures to come!