EP #158: Why New Concrete Fails Faster Than the Old Stuff (And How to Fix It)

Seth (00:00)
Welcome to another episode of the Concrete Logic Podcast. And today I have Dr. Jon Belkowitz. He's back on the show. And today we're going to talk about spring. You know, the weather's warming up. Spring is when concrete starts telling the truth. So what is your concrete telling you? Now that hopefully where you're listening from all the snow and ice have melted. Kind of had a... No.

Dr Jon (00:25)
Not in Colorado.

Seth (00:27)
No, we've had an actual spring. feels like we've had an actual spring this year. So that's good. Yeah. Yep. But before we get into the topic of hand, just remind everybody how you can support the show. first of all, if you learn, something from this episode or the 150 plus episodes that we've done so far, please share, the podcast with a colleague or a coworker. the

Dr Jon (00:32)
Awesome.

Seth (00:50)
Next thing you can do is if you go to ConcreteLogicPodcast.com, you can reach out to me and there's a couple ways you can reach out to me. At the top of that homepage, there is a Ask Seth option on the menu. Click on that and that pops up an email form.

in that email form, what I'm looking for is a topic or a guest suggestion. So reach out, let me know what you want to hear, who you want to hear from on the podcast, because that's why we're doing this. We're doing this for you all. The other way you can get ahold of me is on the same homepage. If you don't want to fill out that form, is there's a microphone in the bottom right hand corner. You click on that and that'll record your message to me. It leaves me a voicemail. It records right over your computer.

and then the last way is, it's same homepage. you will find a link there to the academy. you click on that, they'll, they'll take you right to the academy. And if you enjoy the way we, we teach you all on this, on the podcast, you'll, you'll enjoy the academy as well, except for we expand on the podcast. So not only will you get the same kind of, you know, the same kind of topics and

and education that you get on the podcast. also get quizzes and resources and articles and also, which I, if you're a member, I feel like you guys aren't taking advantage of this is that you're, can post your own concrete questions on the platform. So post your questions on there. Everybody's having problems out there. Don't be scared to ask. If you are scared to ask, just send me a direct message and

We'll take care of it from there. you guys gotta get your problems out there. We're all having the same problems and the more we discuss them, the more we all will benefit from them. So that is ConcreteLogicAcademy.com. And if you forget all that, go to ConcreteLogicPodcast.com. has all the links and everything to the Academy. Dr. Jon, let's get to the topic at hand. So.

Dr Jon (02:52)
Yes, sir.

Seth (02:52)
So we were talking before we hit record is paying attention to what's going on to your existing concrete. This time of year, and we'll probably do an episode here soon about hot weather concrete because we're getting into the season. But what we're talking about is existing concrete now that the weather is warming up. Your concrete's trying to tell you something. So what is it trying to tell us?

Dr Jon (03:04)
Right.

Well, mean, Dan McCoy once said about the concrete pump that it's the ultimate lie detector on the job site. And I tell you that that transition between spring and summer, it's another one of those lie detectors where, you know, am I sharing that photo? I'm not sharing that photo. And for the folks who are listening, you know, this is a podcast.

Seth (03:31)
⁓ not at the moment.

Dr Jon (03:39)
⁓ What I'm showing is a sidewalk from Trine University. I teach there during the year, material sciences class, and we have the sidewalk that's part concrete that was made in the late 90s, and then on the left side is that late 90s concrete, and it looks like traditional concrete that's been there for about 20, 30 years. You know, it's gray, and you can see some of the sand showing through, and you can see remnants of the broom finish.

And Seth, tell me if I'm lying or not. You could still see those broom finish strokes. But on the right hand side you have this other concrete that looks almost like they used to type white cement. that's what I find crazy is nobody asks.

Seth (04:12)
Yeah. Yeah.

Dr Jon (04:26)
When did concrete go from being gray to green or gray to brown or gray to white like this? And then also if you look a little bit closer just like I did before, I don't know if I know how to make this work. There you go. Not only...

Seth (04:42)
Yeah, there's

a dark spot in the newer concrete. So we're looking at a photo, I guess. Half of it is showing older concrete, and then the other half is showing concrete that was placed last year. And the older concrete is much, much darker. It's definitely a gray. And then the new concrete on the right-hand side is

Dr Jon (04:55)
Right.

big.

Seth (05:11)
almost white and it's got some definitely it's got some blotches. It looks like blotches in it. And then what I would assume is some scaling. It looks like the, yeah. Yeah.

Dr Jon (05:22)
Well, that's the lamination and scaling and flaking of the circle. And then

you lose those broom strokes too, the broom marks.

Seth (05:31)
Yeah, you don't see any broom.

Dr Jon (05:32)
Right now, whether this was caused by type one, I don't care about that conversation. It's just during the winter, we didn't see that. You know, whether there was excessive ice or snow on the ground, or there was a combination of that and slush or dirt, it's just nobody looks down to see the wear and tear of the concrete during the winter. We more look down just to watch our steps.

Seth (05:33)
So.

Dr Jon (06:01)
So when it comes to that transition between the spring and summer, which we're at, this is when we get the most amount of rain. So our concrete is at its cleanest. And the great thing about concrete when it comes to a litmus paper test, when we see damage in concrete,

that damage is often accentuated after the rain. When good concrete dries, damaged concrete has a tendency of holding onto the water and staying, as what Seth said, blotchy. ⁓

A good way of looking for an alkalized silica reaction is after it rains, if I can find it quickly, ASR gel cracks. Not only do they have that Isle of Man crack, but the crack, the gel in it will hold onto water more so than good concrete that isn't cracked. So it's the same thing here. The bad concrete is holding onto water in the more deteriorated spots, ⁓ and there's just a whole bunch of deterioration going on.

no.

Seth (07:10)
I'm still here. I'm just playing around. ⁓ So, so is it is it starving for water still? Is that why it's it's holding on to the water or what's going on there?

Dr Jon (07:14)
Here's a shit.

No, you know when it comes to the deterioration of the concrete surface now what we're doing is increasing the surface area We're losing that cap that cementitious cap over the surface and now we've got that interface between the paste and the rock I think you can see it right here

Seth (07:39)
Yeah.

Dr Jon (07:39)
So that surface area by itself, because it's going in and around the rock, is just going to hold on to more water. And just because there's more surface area, there's going to be more water than if it was just a flat surface without all these undulations from the exposed rock. So yeah, that's normally why. Let me see if I can find that ASR picture. ⁓

And especially when it comes to ASR gel or even ⁓ corrosion, steel corrosion. Wherever concrete's cracking with steel corrosion, you normally can see the steel bleeding out of the concrete cracks.

Seth (08:20)
Right. Yeah, I think we've shared that on the episode before. That's pretty gross.

Dr Jon (08:25)
yeah.

Well, it's gross, but you you can start seeing things quite clearly. This is a spillway. Do you mind if I share this? And you can be the interpreter.

Seth (08:42)
that.

Dr Jon (08:43)
Right. So I guess this is a little bit more severe, but why don't you give your audience, you know, your...

Seth (08:52)
So back up, you zoomed in too close. want to give them the... All right, so what we're looking at is, you said it's a spillway.

Dr Jon (08:55)
Sorry. Sorry.

That is the Spellway.

Seth (09:02)
Okay, so for folks that don't know what a spillway is this looks like some water up against a concrete wall and It looks like the water is below ⁓ the level that's been before and above the the water on the wall itself There's a bunch of white streaks Falling from

almost from the top of the wall down to the water.

⁓ What are these white streaks?

Dr Jon (09:36)
So that white streak is a combination of salt, water, and steel, because they're not just white, they're like white, creamy to brown. It's a combination of the salt, the silica gel, so the ASR gel, water, and then steel bleeding out. And can I zoom in now?

Seth (09:46)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah. Yeah. And that the

salts, just to throw back to Bob Higgins episode, we've talked about this before, ⁓ are those originating from the aggregate that's within the concrete usually?

Dr Jon (10:14)
⁓ It is, I would say it's, this is gonna be my liberal approach as you say, but it's originating from the body of the concrete and that could be from the rock, but it's the combination, the gel that's originating from the rock, the ASR gel.

Seth (10:32)
So it could come from what's in the cement as well that's interacting with it. Yeah.

Dr Jon (10:36)
hell yeah. Yeah,

if you have some limestone fines in there, especially that have some type of expansive, you know, ⁓ dolomitic limestone, yeah, you can get the same thing. And that's called alkali-carbonate reaction, and there is no adding a little bit of fly ash or nano silica. That stuff you just screwed.

Seth (10:45)
huh.

Yeah.

Dr Jon (10:56)
If you

have it, get rid of the stuff. But my point I was trying to make from this, all those gels, you really you did a great job illustrating that water line is extremely low, so these cracks are pretty much dry. So I wanted to show this as a before picture of these are the cracks. We can clearly see the gels coming out of the crack, but this is what it looks like when the concrete is dry. Okay, now...

Seth (11:18)
Yeah.

Yeah, looks like it's scabbing

on top of the concrete. It's like a white scab.

Dr Jon (11:27)
Yes.

The technical term, I love it, is exudation. When there is a gel oozing out of the cracks. And that's how you define it. Oozing out of the cracks. Do you mind if I share another picture after the rain?

Seth (11:36)
huh.

Right?

Okay. You've already shared pictures you can stop asking. Just do it.

Dr Jon (11:53)
Uh-uh, I'm gonna ask you every fricking time. So this is after the rain. So there are times that the gel can be washed off, or the salts can be washed off, and the concrete has dried out. But as you see here, let me see if I can go to that picture. Do you mind if I zoom in on it? ⁓

Seth (11:55)
Okay.

So

is this the same wall?

Dr Jon (12:18)
It's a similar wall. How's that? Yeah.

Seth (12:20)
Similar, okay. So did this

have the ooze, the white ooze coming out of it before and now it's gone?

Dr Jon (12:24)
Yeah. The exudation, yes, the white

ooze, it got cleaned off from the rain and what you're left with is all the staining and you can't help that you're gonna have more gel that's gonna come out of the concrete.

Right? It's already cracked. The problem is not surface. The problem is within the body of the concrete. So no matter what you clean off the surface, it's going to ooze out again. Right?

Seth (12:43)
Yeah.

Yeah.

infected.

Yep. If I only knew someone that had a product that would fix that.

Dr Jon (13:00)
this day.

Well, hold on a second. That's a really

good thing. Like, okay, yeah, Eddystone, we're definitely using Eddystone on concrete that has ASR, and we're not using it blindly. We're measuring it using three different types of methods. So we're making sure it's doing a good job. That being said, I mean, the Eddystone is not fixing it. And I don't mind saying that Eddystone is not...

the chemotherapy to the cancer. There is no chemotherapy. This is inches, if not feet, into the concrete. There's no taking care of it. This is trying to delay the inevitable, which is...

Seth (13:34)
Right.

Right, eventually it's going to deteriorate

and it crumble, but you're prolonging the life of the concrete, which...

Dr Jon (13:54)
Yeah. It's a good thing. You know, somebody else that I don't think you've had on your podcast, on the podcast, is a gentleman named Matt McCombs. ⁓ come on. Get out. Okay, you need to have him back on. is, he's busy, he's busy, come on.

Seth (13:55)
It's a good thing. That's a green thing. Sustainable thing.

yeah, he's been on.

Yeah, a couple times.

I've been asking him if he's listening. He's, he's,

he's, everyone's busy.

Dr Jon (14:21)
Everybody's busy. ⁓ But Matt is extremely busy at doing what he does best, which is talk about concrete and helping people with concrete solutions using admixtures. One of the things that Mr. McCombs said when low carbon concrete became a thing, he goes, the fastest way to reduce the carbon footprint of your job site

is to have your salesman call and make sure forms are up and they're ready to release trucks. I freaking love that. Like that is just perfect. Perfect. One thing about these cracks, these ASR cracks, what I like about this picture is it shows the progression. Like you can see there's a crack growing right here. You can see that

Seth (14:52)
Yep.

Yeah.

Dr Jon (15:11)
A crack has grown here and it's starting to create others that have that similar, you know, triangular shape. And then we start seeing these areas, you know, what happens when a crack that has already grown and it ages. And the thing is where we have that intersection of the three cracks, you start losing your concrete. Your concrete starts popping out similarly as it's doing right here.

So I, this is one, I use this picture a lot because it, one, it shows the age, the gel, and based on the form work, you can kind of get an idea of the size of the cracks, because ASR cracks, they can be this big and they can be the size of this wall. So it's, it is one of my favorite pictures when it comes to ASR cracking. Look at that.

Seth (16:05)
Yeah, if

you want to learn more about ASR Lookup episode 147, but Dr. Jon did that one too.

Dr Jon (16:15)
You know another good person to talk to about ASR, the person who got me interested, like really in the science of it, lady named Dr. Curtis, Professor Kimberly Curtis from Georgia Tech. She has this paper from 1996 on soft x-ray gel morphology. It's a test that you do. And the pictures that she takes of ASR gel, I don't know if it was the first ones that we ever took of the ASR gel rosette, but.

Seth (16:34)
huh.

Dr Jon (16:44)
It really shows how the infection takes over the concrete or the cement paste and the rock. And knowing that and seeing it under the microscope really helps us understand how to try to reduce its vicious nasty cycle. So I'm a huge fan of this as well as the research.

Now just to before you end it because I can hear you starting to do well. Thanks for joining us That seems like about what we have for today. You weren't okay

Seth (17:13)
No, that's how you end

your coffee talk on LinkedIn. That's what you do.

Dr Jon (17:17)
I do, I do, I do it.

Eddystone does help counteract some of the negative impact that concrete goes through during the wetting and drying cycles and some of the contaminants that come from outside the concrete into the surface. Like I can't do anything about what's happening.

Look what Whitney brought me.

Seth (17:40)
Nice. Bowl of fruit.

Dr Jon (17:41)
you

It smells like summer. But what happens from the outside in, because like I said, ASR happens from within. At a certain point, it's going to exhaust a majority of the supplements to continue that ASR to thrive and survive. Where it gets it from there is outside the concrete. The rain, the snow, the de-icing salts and brines, the splashing, so on and so forth.

Seth (17:42)
Man.

Dr Jon (18:06)
So if we can protect it from that, not only with a sealer, but with a healer, then we get back to what you said, increasing our carbon footprint by not having to tear the concrete out and also being able to choose how we use our money and spend our money.

Seth (18:21)
Yeah. All right. Well, appreciate you coming on the show today. And as always, I have Dr. Jon's link. If you want to reach out to him and learn more about what he's working on and how he could help you out, please check that out in the show notes and make sure you're looking at the show notes. There's all kinds of resources in there. Again, there's links to the podcast.

Dr Jon (18:28)
Yes, sir.

Seth (18:45)
in the academy. Check out the academy.

Dr Jon (18:49)
The PDHs,

PEs have to update their PDHs in July for Maryland, Indiana, Texas, but it's coming up in July this year. So ethics PDHs, I tell y'all, I go through the CLA to do my PDHs. It's money well spent. And unlike other PDHs,

I learned something new every time I take a course. And I tell you something that sounds stupid or silly to say, but I just finished taking an ASR course and a chemical admixtures course from PDH engineer. And it hasn't been updated since the late eighties. Like they're still talking about using calcium chloride as an accelerator.

Seth (19:30)
Well, you know, some people just go through the motions and other people want to learn. whatever. All right.

Dr Jon (19:35)
Amen. Thanks for, thank

God for the Concrete Logic Academy.

Seth (19:39)
All right. All right, Dr. Jon, thanks again. Folks, until next time, let's keep it concrete.