We know many people think UHPC is justa concrete, possibly a special concrete and
with this concrete you do what you just do
with concrete, nothing more. People which
think in this way, should not continue to
deal with UHPC in the future and continue
to mix their old beautiful concrete.
The philosophy of hhbc-consulting is not
the simple replacement of concrete with
UHPC. That would be like replacing gravel
with diamonds.
We use UHPC in the construction industry
where it makes sense, in very specific areas
but our real competitor market in the future
is the steel market. There are a huge number
of applications where UHPC is better, more
durable, cheaper, easier and faster tomanufacture than steel.
UHPC is corrosion and wear resistant and in a HT Version also high temperature resistant (up
to more than 1000°C).
One example of many from the past years, Rolling bearing systems
A steel mill suffered damage to several rolling bearings in the area of the rolling line (the area where the hot slabs are rolled at high speed and high speed to thinner plates). These rolling bearings are manufactured from a very special casting. The problem was that not enough bearing systems were available. These bearing systems are extremely expensive and have a very long delivery time.
In this case the steel plant would have had to wait more than 4 months. What would mean 4 months, the rolling mill could only be used to 30% of the capacity, a million loss.
By chance, we had heard of this problem in ameeting for a machine floor renovation. We
looked at the drawings and specifications out
of pure interest. After a short internal
discussion, we made the following proposal
to the plant management:
We can copy the bearing completely made of UHPC. We could mix the UHPC material with graphite balls of a certain quality and size. We could achieve a high compressive strength of the material. We could process it to have similar surface roughness as the original bearing and what was extremely important we were sure to provide such a bearing to the factory in just four weeks.
We have provided the factory with the bearing systems within four weeks at one sixth of the original price. The bearings were in operation for 5 months, by 80% of the production capacity until they could be replaced with the newly made cast bearings. We have saved a lot of money for the plant with our UHPC solution.
´
