Effects of silicon fume and latex on properties and hydration of modified mortars
Polybutadiene-graft-polystyrene (PB-g-PS) latex with a weight ratio of 50/50 was used to modify cement mortar. This study examines the effects of silicon fume content and the polymer-cement ratios (P/C) on the flow, compressive and flexural strength and water absorption rate of PB-g-PS latex modified cement mortar. The experimental results show that the flow of modified mortar is increased with increasing polymer-cement ratios, and it is decreased with increasing silicon fume content, PB-g-PS latex and suitable silicon fume content can markedly reduce capillary water absorption rate. PB-g-PS latex can marked influences much on the mechanical properties of modified mortars. The compressive of the polymer modified mortar decreased, and the flexural strength of a portion of polymer modified mortar increased. The suitble silicon fume can improve mechanical properties of modified mortats. The effect of PB-g-PS latex and silicon fume content on cement hydration was explored by XRD, the analysis results showed that the cement hydration was influenced by silicon fume content and P/C.
Properties of plain and latex modified Portland cement pastes and concretes with and without superplasticizer
Abstract This paper deals with the effects of latex concentration on the workability and strength characteristics of Portland cement pastes with and without superplasticizer. Durability assessments are made by immersing these pastes in 5% Na2SO4 and 2.5% NaCl solutions. From the results obtained, it is found that the superplasticizer and superplasticizer–latex combinations may improve the workability of the Portland cement pastes. The Portland cement pastes with superplasticizer have much higher strengths than the latex modified Portland cement pastes with and without superplasticizer. In general, curing in lime-saturated water adversely affect the strength of the pastes containing latex from about 28 days onwards. In the durability test, the resistance of latex modified Portland cement pastes with and without superplasticizer to NaCl is decreased. Degradation mechanism depends on the characteristics of the corrosive medium as well as the resistance of the material itself to the resulting chemical action. The character of strain–stress data of latex modified concretes becomes more prominent as the latex concentration increases. These data are anomalous when compared with the data normally observed for concretes without admixture. The proposed equations are found adequate to describe the stress–strain behaviour of latex modified concretes in compression. These equations can also be applied in calculating the initial modulus of elasticity and proportional limit in the case of polymer modified concretes, which exhibit non-linear behaviour at high stress.
Hedy: A Gradual Language for Programming Education
One of the aspects of programming that learners often struggle with is the syntax of programming languages: remembering the right commands to use and combining those into a working program. Prior research demonstrated that students submit source code with syntax errors in 73% of cases and even the best students do so in 50% of cases. An analysis of 37 million compilations by 250.000 students found that the most common error was a syntax error, which occurred in almost 800.000 compilations. It was also found that Java and Perl are not easier to understand than a programming language with randomly generated keywords, stressing the difficulties that novices face in understanding syntax. This paper presents Hedy: a new way of teaching the syntax of a programming language to novices, inspired by educational methods by which punctuation is taught to children. Hedy starts as a simple programming language without any syntactic elements such as brackets, colons or indentation. The rules slowly and gradually change until the novices are programming in Python. Hedy is evaluated on 9714 programs.