It often happens that people mistakenly interchange the words cement and concrete.
But, there’s a big difference.
Cement is usually made from crushed and burnt limestone. It is used as a binder to glue sand or rocks (aggregate) or blocks together, as in a wall or building or driveway. Most cement is portland cement, which hardens because of a chemical reaction when water is mixed with the powder.
The result of mixing cement with aggregate, or filler, is concrete. Concrete has been used as a structural material for thousands of years, beginning with the ancient Romans and Greeks and continuing since.
It’s said that today, concrete is the most widely used building material in the world. World famous concrete structures include Hoover Dam, the Panama Canal and more recently, one of the world’s largest concrete construction projects, the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River in China.
At the Drake Cement plant, locally mined limestone and silica are blended with iron, aluminum and other raw ingredients in a totally enclosed environment. The ground-up ingredients are heated in massive preheating towers and then fed into a kiln and cooked to 2,700 degrees Fahrenheit.
The resulting “clinkers” are then ground into a fine powder and mixed with small quantities of gypsum. Gypsum helps control the amount of time it takes cement, when wet, to harden.
The cement powder then is stored in silos, where it ultimately is loaded onto trucks for distribution. Much of the cement goes to Drake Materials, which operates a fleet of about 100 ready-mix trucks in various Arizona locations to serve construction needs within the state. QCBN
By Ray Newton
Quad Cities Business News
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