Determination of density and compressive strength of lightweight foamed concrete using frequency domain approach

Abstract

A fast and nondestructive method for predicting density and compressive strength of Lightweight Foamed Concrete (LFC) is proposed. The measurement is carried out using a frequency domain approach to determine the Lightweight Foamed Concrete dielectric constant from a frequency range of 150 kHz to 8 GHz. The relations of the dielectric, density, and compressive strength of lightweight foamed concrete has been investigated, and the correlation models have been formulated using Jonscher fitting model. The results show a close estimation with the relative error controlled within 2.6% and 6.0% for the density and the compression strength computation, respectively. The proposed frequency domain method is shown to be effective and can be applied to determine the mechanical attributes as well as the electrical properties of the LFC simultaneously.