Super-Critical CO2 and Concrete

Greetings, People working with materials such as concrete and lime which depend upon CO2 for their curing, might find the following of interest, if not of immediate practicality:
http://www.sciam.com/1196issue/1196techbus1.html

Ethan Gross

This is amazing! Well worth keeping an eye on. Remember that the action has to happen in a pressure vessel. Fly ash is presently added to concrete as a super-fine and gives doubling and more to the PSI compression test results.

Dan, The process is used to decaffeinate coffee, extract compounds from herbs, and most importantly, can remove the fat from potato chips, thus enabling people to eat even more potato chips!

Ethan

Well spotted Ethan!

I always wondered about curing in a CO2 autoclave. Will have to try this. I have a big bottle of Nitrogen, almost run out, when it expires I think I will exchange it for CO2 - works great for homebrew beer - its got to be great for howebrew sculpting.

The flyash is also great, in fact critical, for getting rid of air bubbles in concrete - very inexpensive too.

If you really want to boost the strength and water resistance of lime plaster, concrete, etc. use pozzolans available for example from liner rolpanit www.linrol.com. I haven't personally tried them but I know this was the ancient secret for super strong concrete and even today they are imported to North America from Italy, etc. As described on the website, there is some unique chemical linkage which occurs. The Romans used it on the base part of frescos and bath areas.