Supercrete to rule world

A world of half-mile high skyscrapers has come closer with the development of a new super concrete at Dundee University.

"Nothing can touch this material. It has amazing properties," said Rod Jones of Dundee's department of civil engineering. "It should not be thought of as the rather boring grey porridge you stick in your back garden. This is a high performance material. It is like the difference between a Penny Farthing and a Ferrari."

The "supercrete", five or six times stronger than ordinary concrete, is so strong that on its own it would explode when it reached maximum stress point. But its strength has been harnessed by compressing it within steel tubes.

The combination of an exterior steelwall and a high performance, high strength concrete inside creates an externally reinforced structure with the same capacity as a normal concrete column of three times the diameter.

"This is starting to give you a hybrid material which has the potential for structures which are taller and more slender," Dr Jones said.

Supercrete should also be able to absorb more energy, and its ability to offset buckling for much longer than current comparable concrete structures could make it a likely material for earthquake zones, he said. It has just completed its first trials, being pounded to destruction point by a giant compression machine made from the foot-thick armour of Second World War tanks. The next stage will be to connect supercrete columns to piles, floors or other parts of a structure to see how they can be made to work together.

The university is devising computer programmes to model the way in which structures behave, based on the results of the trials so far. The project is the product of links between Dundee's civil engineering department and two local companies, John Fyfe Readymix and Brown & Tawse, who brought in special aggregates to incorporate into the mix and supplied the steel tubes.

Dr Jones said: "It is early days yet, but if supercrete fulfils its early promise and can be fully harnessed, it could have a radical effect on the construction industry."