Car Insurance

You might call insurance a “necessary evil.” You can’t own a home or drive a car without it. When life moves along smoothly and you don’t make a claim, you wonder why you you’re paying for it in the first place.

If you do make a claim, it most likely means you were in a traffic accident or your home was damaged or destroyed in a fire or a bad storm. Either way, you pay and you lose.

But in some cases, a little bit of insurance can be a good thing. How about some SCC insurance? There are few issues in our industry as exciting and important as self-consolidating concrete (SCC). What would you say if I told you there is a way to formulate an SCC mix design that is guaranteed to meet the parameters and characteristics you set out for it?

There has been much research conducted on SCC, but none of it got down to the nuts and bolts of material selection, the actual mix design calculation, and the influences of certain variables.

To help cover those bases and tie up those loose ends, Axim Italcementi Group, the admixtures supplier in Middlebranch, Ohio, launched its SCC Web-based mix-design software online at www.scczone.com in early 2003. For the six previous years, Axim had used the technology in a non-Web-based application only in-house.

But as SCC became more popular, “we saw it was going to take a large portion of the market going out to 2010, so we developed a plan to have this model become a part of our entire offering,” says Jim Wamelink, Axim’s director of marketing. “We could sell admixtures and give you a support person, but combine that with this mathematical model, and you will design SCC day in and day out perfectly.”