Sika develops and markets a complete range of admixtures and additives for use in concrete, cement and mortar production. These products enhance specific properties of the fresh and hardened concrete, such as workability, watertightness, durability, or early and final strength.
"Our Concrete Systems team places sustainability at the heart of everything we do, with a particular emphasis on the health and safety of people. We strive to extend the service life of buildings, reduce maintenance efforts, enhance energy and material efficiency, and improve user-friendliness and safety profiles. Sika's concrete admixtures support the construction industry by combining high performance with a lower carbon footprint." Sven Asmus, Corporate Technology Head Concrete Systems
Combining Sustainability and Performance
Extended workability, controlled over several hours, is especially important for urban construction sites with congested traffic, or remote areas resulting in long transportation times. At the same time, once the concrete is placed, fast curing is of utmost importance to meet tight construction schedules. Sika ViscoFlow® is a workability enhancing admixture, based on a new inhouse-developed polymer which significantly prolongs the workability time of the fresh concrete and still ensures equally fast strength development. The workability time can be modified in accordance to job site requirements.
Since more than a hundred years, Sika paves the way for progress in concrete solutions by developing and marketing admixtures and additives for use in concrete, cement and mortar production. Sika has the technologies to make this building material considerably more environmentally friendly.
| Typical Application | Sika Solution | Special Performance |
|---|---|---|
| Water Reducing Admixtures | Sika® ViscoCrete® | Highly efficient superplasticizer based on polycarboxylates |
| Workability Enhancing Admixtures | Sika ViscoFlow® | Newly developed PCE, enhancing the workability time significantly, allowing for the time needed to transport and to place the concrete properly |
| Shrinkage Controlling Admixtures | Sika®Control | Strong reductions in concrete shrinkage. Up to 40% is possible. |
| Cohesiveness enhancing Admixtures | Sika® Stabilizer | Increases overall mix cohesiveness without promoting concrete stiffening, which ultimately results in easier placement, reduced consolidation effort and improved aesthetics |
Securing Quality for Concrete
Concrete is the most used building material in the world. Look at any infrastructure, tunnel, dam, parking lot, parking deck, or skyscraper. Any improvement in the engineering of concrete is a benefit for everyone. Improvements can include cost, strength, durability, or ease of application. And as the material evolves, our infrastructure becomes safer. However, concrete is a composite material: it is only as good as its weakest component. Sika admixture technologies are based upon the fact that the quality of raw materials and their respective properties vary widely and tend to weaken throughout the world. Sika technologies therefore aim to improve upon some of the known gaps in concrete as a composite material.
Durability of Concrete Structures
As the cost of structures increases so does the need to keep these structures in service for as long as possible. This effectively reduces the life-cycle costs and aids in the investment decision from a time-value of money perspective. Limiting and preventing cracks protects the high alkaline environment that the concrete inherently creates. This, in turn, protects the reinforcement from corrosion. This is one of the most important attributes of concrete durability and one of the hardest to achieve consistently, but that is all about to change. A new shrinkage reducing/compensating admixture like Sika®Control SRA has the potential to generate a shrinkage neutral concrete, in other words, non-shrink concrete. High-performance concrete thus is not a single type of concrete, but rather, any number of concrete engineered to possess certain properties suitable for a particular construction application.
