Urbanisation giving a boost to modern construction chemicals market

The concrete industry nowadays faces new challenge on manufacturing concrete with more stringent technical requirements and as the urbanisation increases, the usage of concrete rises. But apart from challenge from manufacturing it also faces huge hurdles in construction especially due to vertical growth in cities with mushrooming of high-rise buildings.
 
“There are three challenges mainly faced while pumping to high-rise projects such as blockage of concrete, wear and tear of pipes and lastly the quality of concrete coming out is not appropriate because of pumping pressures, variable pressures etc. Therefore lots of difficulties are encountered,” said Dr Prakash Nanthagopalan, Assistant Professor, Department of Civil Engineering – IIT Bombay, on the sidelines of a one-day national technical seminar on ‘Modern construction chemicals and systems for construction industry’ organised by IIT-Bombay and Chryso India in Mumbai recently. The conference was the first of a series of such seminars to be held in various cities across India.
 
To overcome such difficulties there should be proper understanding of concrete. “A high-rise building is a big project therefore there should be fundamental understanding of what type of concrete, quality of concrete, and then whether it will be pumpable or not,” said Dr Nanthagopalan.
 
Philippe Ortega, Vice Technical Director, Chryso SAS (France) explained that in order to address the challenges of urbanisation in countries such as India, the construction industry has been continuously ensuring the need for more and more concrete projects. The highest technical expectations nowadays have to be fulfilled however with raw materials which properties may often vary. This equation becomes particularly difficult to solve when the concrete has to be pumped, as it normally requires a suitable rheological behavior, as regular as possible.
 
Laurent Guillot, Cement BU Technical Director, Chryso Group felt that the cement industry environment is moving forward. New regulations are being implemented all around the world. In India, the trend is to proceed through new cements with further optimised compositions (evolution of BIS Indian standard). The use of higher amounts of substitute cementitious materials (so lower clinker contents) may require the use of powerful activators. These activators have to be designed to focus their chemical activation on correct timing according to the clinker, cementitious additions and reactivity. This will probably lead to new generation of activators.
 
Parallel with this trend, the cement grinding process technology is also moving forward. New equipment designs (pre-grinding systems, mills\separators) are being promoted and implemented. This will enable further optimisation of grinding energy costs. These specific processes will also require dedicated solutions.
 
The cement world is continuously evolving and cement additives cannot be disassociated from the cement, the processes and the alternative cementitious materials. Evolution of any one of these key drivers will require optimisation of the interactions with the cement additive in order to achieve optimum cost effective performance, added Laurent Guillot.