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New
Standards
for
Mixing
Water
By Colin Lobo, Ph.D.,
Vice President of Engineering, NRMCA
in focus
27
tion. On the operational side, the requirement of complying with environmental regulations has increased 10 fold, with recent
enforcement construing violations of the
Clean Water Act as criminal violations. The
volume of recycled water produced at a concrete production facility is significantly higher than that which can be reused and/or
processed for discharge economically. Innovations in equipment and chemical admixtures have since allowed the concrete
producer to better manage process byproducts and achieve a zero-discharge production facility. Many ready mixed concrete
producers in the U.S. and Canada have
made the financial and time commitment to
do so. In Europe and Japan, this is standard
operating procedure.
The standards are needed to catch up
with industry practice. An effort to revise
the provisions for water was initiated in
about 1995. Following several failed ballots
on revisions to C 94, the subcommittee
evolved toward developing a separate specification for mixing water in concrete that was
finally approved in October 2004.
ASTM C 1603 establishes a performance basis for qualification of water for
use in concrete. It distinguishes between
sources of water as potable, non-potable and
water from concrete production operations and
establishes qualification requirements by
requiring a certain frequency of tests
depending on what the producer plans to
use. Combined water is when one or more of
the sources are used in combination. Criteria apply to the total mixing water in concrete whether it is an individual source or a
combination of one or more sources. The
primary or mandatory criteria are to qualify
the proposed water for effects on strength
and setting time of concrete. The criteria
have not changed from the requirements of
C 94 in that test water should not reduce
strength by more than 10 percent or affect
the set time by more than 60 minutes earlier or 90 minutes later compared to a concrete mix with tap water. The difference is
that while the earlier provisions required
these tests to be conducted on mortar and
cement pastes, the current standard allows
this qualification to be done with either lab
or field concrete batches. The other set of
criteria, which are optional, are related to
the chemistry of the water in terms of concentration of chlorides, sulfates, alkalis and
total solids. These are optional in that the
28
WINTER 2005
Combined
Water
Density,
g/mL
Density,
C 1603
N/A
N/A
N/A
N/A
Potable
Non-Potable A
Testing Frequency
<1.01
Concrete
ProductionA
1.01 1.03
Daily
> 1.03
Table 1
Table 2
N/A
3 months; after
4 tests annually
6 months; annually
after 2 tests
Monthly; 3 months
after 4 tests
Weekly; monthly
after 8 tests
N/A
6 months
6 months
A Testing frequencies apply to the combined mixing water when it is wholly or partially composed of the listed source
as defined in Section 3.
(Table reprinted, with permission, from C1602/C1602M-04 Standard Specification for Mixing Water
Used in the Production of Hydraulic Cement Concrete, copyright ASTM International, 100 Barr Harbor Drive, West Conshohocken, PA 19428.)