Clever Concrete Put to the Test

The Weimar Institute of Applied Construction Research (IAB), Germany, has been supporting innovations in the construction industry with user-oriented research and development for almost 30 years. The institute develops, among other things, new concrete formulas to meet the increasing safety and quality requirements. An important part of the development work is material testing, especially the detection of cracks with increasing age of the concrete. Researchers determine these limit loads with compression, bending tensile and tensile tests. In the past, the IAB used strain gauges that were positioned by “gut feeling” for crack localization, but they did not indicate the starting point of damages nor made surface deformations recordable. It is also impossible to predict where exactly cracks occur on the specimen. With ZEISS ARAMIS Adjustable this is a thing of the past.

The obtained measuring data and parameters can additionally be used for the creation of simulation models to determine load scenarios and make predictions regarding material behavior. In order to be able to optimize a simulation to the smallest detail, simulation results imported into the ZEISS software can be compared at a glance with further measurements of prototypes.

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