UST: News

For testing on this day the staff of the SkyWay laboratory have prepared 5 concrete mixtures with different rheological properties, which is extremely important in determining the future quality of concrete and the string rail. It is therefore impossible to overestimate the importance of information about the properties of a mixture, its dependence on various factors, as well as the ability to manage the processes of preparation, setting and production of the finished product. The most significant property of a concrete mixture is the workability or formability, i.e. the ability of the mixture to spread and to take a predetermined shape while maintaining the solidity and homogeneity. It is determined by the mobility (fluidity) of a concrete mixture at the time of filling the form and plasticity, i.e. the ability to deform without breaking the continuity.

To test the behavior of the concrete mixture in the required conditions, the research laboratory have prepared 5 original SkyWay recipes with different rheological characteristics, such as the ultimate shear stress, viscosity and the relaxation period. For a full assessment of concrete mixtures and further organization of producing string rails, they have tested such their properties as: compactability, uniformity, ability to delaminate, the volume change during solidification, air entrainment, initial strength, the possibility of pumping over a long distance and many others. For this, on the territory of the plant "Belenergostroyindustria" they have welded a simulation of a string-rail track structure 100 m long, arranged the required control and measuring instruments.

The employees of the Design bureau and the laboratory under the direction of the SkyWay General designer Anatoly Yunitskiy during the day pumped through it 5 types of concrete mixture, studying their properties, conditioned by complex physicochemical processes occurring in them, because any concrete mixture is a complex multi-component system. Being placed in a space limited by the configuration of the string rail, and also due to the presence of interaction forces between dispersed particles of the solid phase and water, the system acquires a coherence and can be considered as a single physical body with definite rheological, physical and mechanical properties of the composition, viscosity and weight. The production engineer Victor Dolgiy, one of the developers of the special concrete for the production of string rails, commented the obtained results right after the tests.