Concrete fence walls rely on good cememt in the mix

With our experience building precast concrete fences and walls from our main office in Los Angeles, we’ve become pretty comfortable with a good understanding of the concrete and cement business. Despite what you read normally, “concrete” and “cement” are not really the same product. Sidewalks are constructed from concrete, not cement, although cement is a vital ingredient of concrete. Other ingredients include gravel or crushed stone (also known as aggregate), sand, water and, other optional performance-enhancing additives. The trucks you see that most people call cement mixers are actually concrete mixers; cement, like talcum powder, is transported mainly in tank trucks.

The cement in concrete is called Portland cement, because Joseph Aspdin, an English bricklayer who is credited with the invention of its, felt that its color was similar to that of limestone quarried on the Isle of Portland, a peninsula on England’s southern coast. Aspdin got a patent for cement as far back as 1824. He used to heat limestone and clay in a kiln until parts of the mixture fused, then he ground the burned and desiccated result into a fine powder. Adding water to the powder yielded a workable paste and started a complex chemical process, called hydration, in which the water bonded with compounds of calcium, silicon, aluminum and iron, and caused the whole thing to lock together in a rigid mass. Wet Portland cement doesn’t merely “dry,” hydration transforms it into a chemically distinct material, which continues to gain strength over time.

Concrete is actually pretty easy to pull apart. A way to compensate for this tensile weakness (that means it’s easy to break apart) is to add steel reinforcing rods, known as rebar, which hold the concrete in place overall when it cracks.

Another way to reinforce the cement is by adding short lengths of threadlike fibers made of steel, polypropylene, polyolefin, and other materials-samples. Polypropylene is a good idea for an additional reason – it can provide extra fire protection. Concrete is essentially fireproof, but it can fall apart in very high temperatures as free water trapped inside turns to steam, expands, and blows it apart from within. So by adding polypropylene fibers to the mix it can reduce the risk of such failures, because in high heat the fibers melt, leaving voids that act like relief valves for steam. Such concrete can provide extra protection in structures that may be exposed to any of a variety of increasingly ordinary-seeming perils of modern existence, among them fires, explosions, and bomb blasts.

Craig Lewis is CEO of Artisan Precast, Inc., the leader in concrete fence walls and high quality fences and installation services to assure the efficient execution of your landscape project. Since 1982, their fence brands – Woodcrete, Brickcrete, Fencestone, Cedarcrete and Woodcrete Rail,- have become very popularly accepted by architects, landscape designers, engineers, residential, commercial and industrial developers, utility companies, government agencies, and others in the construction industry.

- Menlo Lippowski