DEVELOPMENT OF A CONCRETE MIX DESIGN APPLICATION BASED ON

INTERNATIONAL CODES
Dayang Afiqah Binti Awg Othman1, Syahrul Fithry Bin Senin2

Faculty of Civil Engineering

Universiti Teknologi MARA (UiTM)

Pulau Pinang, MALAYSIA

Email: 1 dayangafiqah@outlook.com, 2 syahfith1@yahoo.com

Abstract
The manual approach to perform an automated program for concrete mix design based on international codes which
includes British Standard (BS)and American Concrete Institute(ACI) . This approach requires interpolations on
determining the intermediate values of the variables for the concrete mix design, which is prone to human errors when
tracing out, estimating and recording values. In this work mathematical equations for concrete mix design in
accordance to the guidelines of British Standard(BS) and American Concrete Institute(ACI) were formulated to replace
the tabulated data, figures and graphs in the DOE concrete mix design charts. .This application was developed as a tool
for automated concrete mix design according to BS and ACI. The application was developed by using the tool of
WEBPLOTDIGITIZER , MICROSOFT EXCEL and MATLAB as programming language. When executed and used
for concrete mix design, the application is able to reduce the computation time ,human error and energy which were
inherent in the manual process. The developed application was intended to ensure a user friendly environment and do
a proper adjustments for the final mix proportions. This application is useful to produce an optimum of a normal
concrete mix design that served the required compressive strength.

American Concrete Institute Method of Mix Design

1. Introduction
In construction sector, concrete is the primary material
in the construction industry along with steel. Concrete
is the second largest material used after food and water
(Adegbola and Dada, 2012). It is made by mixing
cement, water, fine and coarse aggregates and
sometimes admixtures in their right proportions to
obtain the specified property. Concrete mix design is
the process of selecting the appropriate ingredients
such as water, cementitious material and aggregate
along with the correct proportions using suitable
method according to each standard that has been
selected by each country. However to achieve an
optimum design is something that need proper
method, wide knowledge and with the help of good
calculator or software that can produce an optimum
design. Optimum means economical such that cost of
all ingredient of concrete mix design is to be
minimized but has a good workability and desired
strength. There are several methods that has been
produced and improvised to meet the desired aspects
such as Concrete mix proportioning guidelines
(Bureau of Indian Standards -I.S.10262-2009),
(ACI 211), DOE (British) Mix Design Method and
Australian Standard to mention but a few. Mix design
is needed to minimize the cost and produce the most
practical of concrete mix design, to achieve the
desired workability in the plastic stage, to achieve the
desired minimum strength in the hardened stage and to
produce a concrete with the desired durability in the
given environment conditions. If the property of
workability is not achieved, it cannot be properly
placed and compacted.
On the other hand, improper concrete mix design may
lead to design proportion issues, material issues and
external issues. This is because when the concrete mix
is being made, the concrete mix will be assessed and
tested based on its slump. However , these inspection
may face failure in trial mix, where it need to be
designed and mix again which lead to high cost of
labour and issues of material. Thus, most of the
construction process the engineers will skip this step
or continue with the mix design even though the
desired workability is not achieved. This is the reason
why software is needed to aid the user so that the user
can use less time, less cost and labour.(Gendaij &
Juris,1998)
There are few cases of structure failure in Malaysia
due to poor concrete mix design. Though most failure
in the building caused by various factors, wrong
concrete mix design also may contribute to the failure.
When the concrete mix design does not achieve it
compressive strength, this directly cause the concrete
cannot accommodates the strength which it supposed
to resist.
There are few failure cases in the world that resulting
from improper concrete mix design such as
Bangladesh Building Collapse in Dhaka and 2000
Commonwealth Avenue in Boston. (Norbert,2009)
stated that improper concrete mix design and not
prequalified concrete mix design were one of the
significant findings done by a commission that had
been appointed by the mayor of Boston which the
components used were not allowed by the designers
specification such as calcium chloride as accelerator
and the result from the chemical analysis were low of
cement content .Poor quality concrete is one major
reason to low strength of concrete .(Okoloekwe &
Okafor,2007). However an inspection conducted
showed that the concrete amount was sufficient but the
amount of water ratio is too high leading to high
workability property. From the authors point of view,
Bangladesh Building Collapse in Dhaka collapsed
may be attributed to low amount of cement
(Gavin,2013). These two failure cases are enough to
prove that how important is concrete mix design to
achieve structural safety and integrity. This is crucial
as it will determine the life span of the elements, fire
resistance and serviceability of the concrete upon the
purpose of the building to be built which directly to
save budget and time. Thus, this application will allow
the user to design concrete mix based on the
international codes with less errors, less time and cost
savings. It is important to aid the professionals and
the researchers in the process of designing the
concrete mix. The trend on using the computer for
most computations, a computer-aided approach to the
design of concrete mixes is becoming a welcome
practice.(Okoloekwe & Okafor,2007)
2. Methodology
This section will focus on the activities planned for
this work from the preliminary stage to the final stage
of concrete mix design software application based on
international codes. The approach adopted for this
study is by accumulation of data from the literature
review and self conducting of proportioning concrete
mix design. The software that be used for conducting
this study is using MATLAB, WEBPLOTDIGITIZER
and EXCEL . This study focuses on the method of
developing mathematical nonlinear regression
equations relating concrete properties parameters fck,
w/c/ slump, etc to facilitate the prediction process of
concrete properties using MATLAB. Specific
commands and method on designing the programming
code for concrete mix design will be applied based
upon the guidelines and procedure for each design
codes. In this research, the most crucial stage is during
the determination of free water cement ratio as it
affects the whole concrete mix design calculations.
The developed nonlinear regression equations will be
fitted by power law function and compared with the
manual calculation. Using the
WEBPLOTDIGITIZER software, the points that lies
on the curves can be digitized.
This steps is focused finding the relationship which
includes relationship between compressive strength
and free water cement ratio ,estimated wet density of
fully compacted concrete and recommended
proportions of fine aggregates according to percentage
passing a 600m sieve The data points will be
adjusted so that it will follow the curve of the graphs
and the gap of each points are adjusted so the accuracy
will be improved. This step will only be applicable for
graph that possessed nonlinear relationship. Even
though estimated wet density of fully compacted
concrete graphs and recommended proportions of fine
aggregates according to percentage passing a 600m
sieve graphs are nonlinear graphs, points are digitized
to be used for further coding in the MATLAB.T he
decimal points of the output are set to 4 decimal places
on obtaining a better precision interpolated values by
MATLAB. The first step is to convert the actual
graphs into digital image before being analyzed by
Microsoft Excel. The format of the graph must be in
image format. The picture will be converted into jpg
format after taking a screenshot of the graph. The
scale is set for y and x axis. In this software the points
must be draw over the curve in order to digitize the
data. These data points will be used to develop a
mathematical equations by using EXCEL.
Data points that had been extracted from the graph of
relationship compressive strength and free water
cement ratio will be saved in EXCEL. A scattered
graph will be chosen as this points produced a
nonlinear graph. The data points of the graphs plotted
with EXCEL were selected by right-clicking on them.
The Add Trendline, Display Equation and
Correlation (R-square) Values option was then
selected to generate and display the equations.
Exponential equation is chosen as it has the best curve
fit.
ACI is a standard that has many tables and has no
graphs while BS has many graphs and tables to
produce a proportion of concrete mix design.There are
many commands will be required in MATLAB which
will determine the proportions of concrete mix
designs. The input command for strings can be used to
allow any valid combination of letters, numbers, and
symbols. Therefore input command to obtain titles of
plots, file names, and other words or collections of
characters which may want to be used later. Each
conditional statement requires the end keyword. Non
linear equation which will be used to solve free water
cement ratio will use eval command. The eval
command is one of the most powerful and flexible
commands in MATLAB. eval is short for evaluate,
which is exactly what it does; it evaluates MATLAB
expressions. Any command can execute from the
MATLAB prompt, eval can be used to execute the
command from an M-file. Some of the more common
uses for eval are to load and save files with variable
filenames, shell out (!, not supported on the
Macintosh) to the operating system, and concatenate
strings.
BS standard required user to input characteristic
strength of concrete, days of the cement strength,
proportion defective, margin if required, standard
deviation if specified, cement strength class, aggregate
type for fine and coarse aggregate, maximum water
cement ratio, cement content, maximum size of
aggregate, relative density of aggregate and per trial
mix.
ACI standard required user to collect data such as 28
days characteristics compressive strength, bulk density
of crushed aggregate, free surface moisture of sand,
absorption capacities of coarse aggregate, fineness
modulus of fine aggregate, proportion defective, past
records of standard deviation if specified, the presence
of air entrained, slump value, maximum size of
aggregate and water cement ratio by exposure to run
the application.
BS standard procedures are divided into 5 stages
which includes several calculations and data collection
which shown as below:
st
1 stage:
Characteristics strength, standard deviation,
class, type for fine and coarse aggregates, free water cement ratio, maximum free waterand cement
ratio.
content
ACI standards are simpler compared to BS standard as
it has many tables which will only requires simple
interpolation and a few data are standard. Thus the
values taken are already stated and ready to be used
such as estimation of mixing water and air content.
The command will be frequently used in this standard
is conditional statement, interpolation, simple
mathematical equation and input. ACI standard has 9
simple steps that will be used to develop code in the
MATLAB which are material information, choice of
slump, maximum aggregate size, estimation of mixing
and air content, water cement ratio, calculation of
cement content, estimation of coarse aggregate
content, estimation of fine aggregate content and
adjustment for moisture in the aggregate.
In order to validate the developed program, five
examples for each of the BS concrete mix design code
and ACI standard. Each example will be done for
different strength class which are 25 MPA,30 MPA, 35
MPA,40 MPA and 50 MPA with changes made in the
surface condition of the aggregate, were run separately
both manually (using the BS and ACI code) and the
generated equations program. The time taken for each
concrete mix design examples were recorded and
analyzed for determining the effectiveness in terms of
time reduction of the program.
3. Results And Discussion
The developed application is to be run with MATLAB
which will print the output of the concrete mix design
for BS code and ACI code.
The time execution is done by manually and by the
program approach for all five examples of each the
codes. It is as represented in Table 1 and Table 2.
Example 1 in Table 1 which required the most time
compared to the other 4 examples is because more
input and information are required to be input by the
user which take the most time. Contrary to example 3
which the input for the program and specified
information less. Here means that example 1 has more
calculation required with more information such as
margin,margin,
standard deviation
target mean and cement
strength, content while
cement strength
example 3 has the information of margin
the
MATLAB will done the calculation.

ACI standard time execution is in the range below

2nd stage: Slump or Vebe time, maximum aggregate size, free water content
3rd stage: Cement content, maximum cement than 1 minute. Thiscement
content,minimum is because the calculation
content, run by
midified free water
cement ratio the MATLAB is much easier where it only need to do
4th stage Relative density of aggregate, concretesimple
density,interpolation from
total aggregate the tables. The most time
content
5th stage taken
Grading of fine aggregate, proportion of fineisaggregate,
from example 2. Table content,
fine aggregate 1 and Table 2 shown
coarse aggregate
that by using the program approach it is more efficient 2 7:40.58 0:48.72
with percentage error is within the permissible limit.
3 7:11.11 0:40.28
The percentage errors of the results of variables of
4 7:05.19 0:39.11
concrete mix design calculated with the program to
those of the values available in the BS concrete mix 5 7:35.04 0:47.84
design code with the highest value of 4.5627% which
is cement content occurring in application in Table
3.Contrary to ACI standard the percentage error is Table 3. Percentage Error of Program Results
very small with the highest is only 3.625% and the Compared to BS Code Values for Application of
lowest percentage error is nearly 0 %and 0.02%. The Concrete Grade 30
main reason for this difference between the results
generated by the program and those available in the

Program

(round to 5kg) Program

Concrete

Manual

(round to 5 kg) Manual

% Error
Variable
BS code is that some parameters in the code are
usually estimated in ranges and then a considerable
value within the range is picked. Also, there are
usually occurrences of double approximation or
rounding up in the manual or code method. The water Target 46 46 0
mean
content, for example, when calculated is usually
strength
rounded to the nearest 5Kg immediately. Thereafter, Free 0.46 0.468 1 .
this same value is divided by the free-water cement water/ceme 739
ratio to obtain the cement content. The cement content nt ratio
Proportion 27 26.70 -
also will be rounded up to the nearest 5kg. The
of fine 6 1.089
proportion of fine aggregate for example is usually aggregate
estimated in the range of a to b and then say c, Total 1892. 1906. 0.757
in which c is a value bounded by a and b. The aggregate 17 5 3
equations and the program, however, give exact values content
Free water 160 160 160 160 0
of these variables and parameters of concrete. content
Cement 347.8 350 342.1 340 -
Table 1. Time executed of the Generated Application content 3 9 4.562
for BS standard. 7
Fine 510.8 510 509.1 510 -
Applicati Manual Approach Automated Approach aggregate 9 4 0.342
on content 5
Example min:sec min:sec Coarse 463 465 465.7 465 0.600
aggregate 8
content(10
1 8:34.19 1:08.59 mm)
Coarse 926 925 931.5 930 1.140
2 7:53.97 0:48.72 aggregate 6 9
content(20
3 8:10.90 0:47.83 mm)

4 7:55.67
5 8:27.36
0:51.25
Table 4. Percentage Error of Program Results
0:53.85
Compared to ACI Code Values for Application of
Concrete Grade 30

Table 2. Time executed of the Generated Application

for ACI standard.

Applic Manual Automated

ation Approach Approach
Examp
le min:sec min:sec

1 6:59.99 0:35.18
 Manual (Adjustment for water absorption and free surface moisture)
Program(Before adjustment for water
Program(Adjustment for water absorption and free surface moisture)
Concrete Variable

% Error
Ce 4 4 4 4 -

Manual(Before adjustment for water

me 4 4 4 4 0
nt 4 5 4 4 .
co . . . 1
nte 4 4 4 2
nt 4 4 4 5
8
Fin 7 7 7 7 -
e 2 3 1 2 1
ag 0 2 8 9 .
gre . . . 5
gat 8 5 3 2
e 6 3 0
absorption and free surface moisture)

co 8
absorption and free surface moisture)

Tar 3 3 - nte
get 7 7 0 nt
me . . . Co 9 9 9 9 1
an 4 3 1 ars 9 8 8 9 .
str 2 8 0 e 2 2 2 2 0
en 5 2 ag . 1
gth 2 gre 0 8
Fre 0 0 0 gat 8 3
e . . e
wa 4 4 co
ter/ 5 5 nte
ce nt
me
nt
rati 4. ConclusionAnd
o
Co 8 8 - Recommendations
ars 8 5 3
e 2 0 . Mathematical Equations for concrete mix design,
ag . . 6 adjustments and optimization in accordance with
gre 7 7 2 British Department of Environment (DOE) and
gat 5 5 5
e
American Concrete Association method have been
co coded into computer programs written in Java
nte programming language using MATLAB The
nt developed software are presented as a replacement to
Fre 2 1 2 1 0
the tabular data, figures and charts available in the BS
e 0 9 0 9 .
wa 0 9 0 9 0 and ACI concrete mix design manual usually used for
ter . . 2 conventional concrete mix design. The need to:
co 1 1 0 minimize considerably the expended human energy
nte 0 4 and computational errors; reduce the time taken in the
nt
concrete mix design process; eliminate interpolation of
data, and optimize the desirable constituents of
concrete to achieve optimum compressive strength at
minimum cost, necessitated this work. All these needs
were met in the developed programs. It is
recommended that, in future, the scope of this work be
extended from the design of normal weight concrete to
other types of concrete such as heavy weight, light
weight, pumpable concrete and to be developed with
other international codes. Also, it is desirable that a
thorough research into verification with laboratory
work to prove the reliability of this application.

5. References
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