Ensuring quality through cement and concrete testing is critical to civil engineering success. A structure’s integrity is entirely reliant on the materials employed, making it essential for cement to undergo multiple tests to determine how it interacts with the other ingredients in the concrete mix. Cement and concrete are two of these materials that have different but related functions. Although they are frequently discussed together, the equipment and testing procedures for concrete and cement are very different. Here, we at HEICO offer the main distinctions between Cement Testing Machine vs. Concrete Testing Machine in this post.

What is Cement Testing?

Cement testing equipment is used to evaluate cement quality parameters like fineness, consistency, initial and final setting times and soundness etc.

Compression testing, air permeability testing, setting time testing, flexural strength testing, drying shrinkage/expansion testing, length change testing, and many more are cement tests. Among cement testing procedures, initial and final setting times, air permeability, and compression are the most often used.

A Vicat needle is used to measure the cement’s setting time in compliance with ASTM C191. Two (2) standard techniques of operation are used to determine deterministically the initial and final setting timings, by dropping the needle over cutoffs that are predetermined intervals of time. While method A permits the Vicat apparatus’s manual use, method B involves the automated version in line with the qualification requirements for this method..

The ASTM C204 Air Permeability test is also used to evaluate the hydraulic cement fineness and the Blaine Air Permeability Apparatus is used as the primary device. The specific surface of the cement is the total surface area measured in square centimeters per gram or square meters per kilogram. As with the setting test, there are two procedures for the Air Permeability test. While Method B allows the use of an automated Blaine Apparatus to meet the certification qualification for the use of this method, Method A employs a manually operated Blaine Apparatus.

These tests are performed with a dedicated Cement Testing Machine that is accurate and often designed for testing small, pre-hardened specimens such as cement paste.

What is Concrete Testing?

Concrete testing equipment is essential for performing the two primary strength tests: compression and tensile tests, crucial for assessing the material’s performance. This gives a general idea of the quality of the concrete, based on the cement paste structure. The compression test, according to ASTM C39/C39M, uses cube or cylinder cement specimens to measure compressive strength. Following careful preparation, the concrete mold specimens are set on the Compression Tester’s surface platen and subjected to a constant force of 0.140 to 0.350 MPa per second until they are crushed. By dividing the highest load in Newtons by the specimen’s average cross-sectional area in square millimeters, the cement’s strength will be determined in megapascals.

A Concrete Testing Machine may use very large, heavy specimens and may apply substantially higher stresses than those applied in cement testing.

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