HPC-09 v6 - Calibration Technology
To calculate Temperature (heat) Development and Compressive Strength for a Concrete Mix Design, Calibrations must be performed. These calibrations are traditionally performed in a lab using so called Calorimeters on a very small specimen.
We feel that this approach has quite a few weaknesses:
- The specimen is so small that it does not represent the actual concrete very well.
- There is no loss of humidity during the (semi-) adiabatic tests peformed.
- Due to their delicate nature, the calorimeter measurements are prone to measurement errors.
Issue number 2 is important, since the real concrete cured at the factory does ineed loose water through evaporation even when bed coverings are used.
One important parameter that needs to be determined is the so called Activation Energy (Ea). The Activation Energy is used to compute both the heat development and the compressive strength of the concrete.
Authors of concrete technology papers disagree on which values are correct for the Activation Energy (Ea), and how it should be determined!
Through our research we have found that the approach used by the different authors are far from ideal. 
Objective Technology thus developed its own Calibration Tool (Figure 1) to compute both Ea and other important parameters. This tool is both faster to use and more accurate than the traditional methods. The animation below (click on the picture) shows the Calibration Tool in a typical calibration run: A typical calibration takes from 15 to 45 minutes to complete: This is a tremendous saving in time and money compared to the traditional methods used!
The animation shows a Time Lapse of a 5 minute run of the tool. The White graph shows measured temperature development, and the Green graph shows how good a match our tool achieves for the computed temperature. We stop the run after 5 minutes (to limit the size of the animation). The Time Lapse compresses the 5 minutes to 6 seconds! Click "Esc" or outside the animation window to close it!
Note that we have hidden the names of the calculated parameters: After all, this is one of our technology assets :-)
Figure 1: HPC-09 v6 Calibration Tool: White Graph: Measured Temperature. Green Graph: Matched Data.
