- Author
- Simon, M. J. | Lagergren, E. S. | Snyder, K. A.
- Title
- Concrete Mixture Optimization Using Statistical Mixture Design Methods.
- Coporate
- Federal Highway Administration, McLean, VA National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, MD
- Book or Conf
- High Performance Concrete International Symposium. Proceedings. PCI/FHWA. October 20-22, 1997, New Orleans, LA, 230-244 p., 1997
- Keywords
- concretes | mixtures | statistical analysis | experiments
- Identifiers
- background on mixture experiments; experiment design for the six-component study mixture components and volume fraction ranges; specimen fabrication and testing; summary of mix proportions (per cubic meter of concrete); test results and costs; ANOVA table for 28-day strength; selection of optimum mix
- Abstract
- The optimization of mixture proportions for high-performance concretes, which contain many constituents and are often subject to several performance constraints, can be a difficult and time-consuming task. Statistical experiment design and analysis methods have been developed specifically for the purpose of optimizing mixtures, such as concrete, in which the final product properties depend on the relative proportions of the components rather than their absolute amounts. Although mixture methods have been used in industry to develop products such as gasoline, metal alloys, detergents and foods, they have seen little application in the concrete industry. This paper describes an experiment in which a statistical mixture experiment was used to optimize a six-component concrete mixture subject to several performance constraints. The experiment was performed in order to assess the usefulness of this technique for high performance concrete mixture proportioning in general.