Roller-compacted concrete

Roller-compacted concrete (RCC) or rolled concrete is a special blend of concrete that has essentially the same ingredients as conventional concrete but in different ratios, and increasingly with partial substitution of fly ash for Portland cement. RCC is a mix of cement/fly ash, water, sand, aggregate and common additives, but contains much less water. The produced mix is drier and essentially has no slump. RCC is placed in a manner similar to paving; the material is delivered by dump trucks or conveyors, spread by small bulldozers or specially modified asphalt pavers, and then compacted by vibratory rollers.

In dam construction, roller-compacted concrete began its initial development with the construction of the Alpe Gera Dam near Sondrio in North Italy between 1961 and 1964. Concrete was laid in a similar form and method but not rolled. RCC had been touted in engineering journals during the 1970s as a revolutionary material suitable for, among other things, dam construction. Initially and generally, RCC was used for backfill, sub-base and concrete pavement construction, but increasingly it has been used to build concrete gravity dams because the low cement content and use of fly ash cause less heat to be generated while curing than do conventional mass concrete placements. Roller-compacted concrete has many time and cost benefits over conventional mass concrete dams; these include higher rates of concrete placement, lower material costs and lower costs associated with post-cooling and formwork.

For dam applications, RCC sections are built lift-by-lift in successive horizontal layers resulting in a downstream slope that resembles a concrete staircase. Once a layer is placed, it can immediately support the earth-moving equipment to place the next layer. After RCC is deposited on the lift surface, small dozers typically spread it in one-foot-thick (300mm) layers.

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