The Blender saga

Sunday 13^th May 2018 

Today I woke up with a terrible cold but there is no rest for the wicked.

I bought a blender yesterday to blend the sponge, which worked surprisingly well………..

This is the video.

The finished product was fine and had so much static, it was actually hard to get out of the jug.

The mix was a strange and quite light; who knew  a sponge only weigh 9 grams ……..

I’m excited about this mix as I think it seems to blend with the concrete better then SAP.

Moving forward the sponge could be soaked in water first and see if this increases the water retention rate ….

Only issue I have is will the concrete block the sponge’s pores.

Guess that’s next week’s discovery 

However, I did find a great place to harvest ferns this morning for the growth experiments, its right outside the weighing room in the concrete lab and it has hundreds of baby ferns, I just need to see how I can get to them, I think some great gymnastics on my part will be needed.

De-moulding;

So today, I de-moulded the rest of the mixes, from the previous days. But the dissolvable bio balls weren’t dry for demoulding.

SAP balls

I liked the fact this created a great open cell structure but it did keep the concrete very wet, so the sample didn’t come out whole, next time I will leave the sample to cure for longer.

The next test for the SAP balls is to see if the can absorb fertilizers or nutrients.

And blend them to use as a kind of render.

1-2% paste 

The mixes did rise but nothing compared to the previous tests, I’m sure it has something to do with the sand.

I can’t tell exactly what’s happening until the samples are cut which I will have done next week and upload images of the inside.

1% Paste










2% Paste

Large aggregate aerated concrete

I also tried a weird idea of make porous aerated concrete and it actually turned out better than I thought it would. The paste has a distinctive foamed element and you can see the aerated element of the paste.

SAP dust 

The SAP dust seems to have worked quite well, the next stage is to see how much water in retains against a control samples; I will also try it with large aggregates/aeration.

I’m away next week at a training course so will try to keep the blog updated ……

But as for the rest of today I need to finish a paper about waste streams and pack…… today is all about the work ……

Happy Sunday everyone !!!!