TRANSPARENT CONCRETE
INTRODUCTION
Concrete has been used since Roman times for the development of infrastructure and housing, but its basic components have remained the same. Three ingredients make up the dry mix: coarse aggregate, consisting of larger pieces of material like stones or gravel; fine aggregate, made up of smaller particles such as sand; and cement, a very fine powder material that binds the mix together when water is added.
Just a few decades ago concrete was often misunderstood, disliked and captured by its image fixed due to the rapid urbanization of the 1960s. But since that time, concrete has made considerable progress, not only in technical terms, but also in aesthetic terms.
It is no longer the heavy, cold and grey material of the past; it has become beautiful and lively. By research and innovation, newly developed concrete has been created which is more resistant, lighter, white or colored, etc. Concrete has learned to adapt to almost all new challenges that appeared. In 2001, the concept of transparent concrete was first put forward by Hungarian architect Aron Losonzi at the Technical University of Budapest, and the first transparent concrete block was successfully produced by mixing large amount of glass fiber into concrete in 2003, named as LiTraCon. The transparent concrete mainly focuses on transparency and its objective of application pertains to green technology and artistic finish. It is the “combination of optical fibers and fine concrete”. At present, green structures focus greatly on saving energy with indoor thermal systems. Therefore it is imperative to develop a new functional material to satisfy the structure in terms of safety monitoring (such as damage detection, fire warning), environmental protection and energy saving and artistic modeling.
Due to globalization and construction of high-rise building, the space between buildings is reduced; this causes to increasing the use of non- renewable energy sources, so therefore there is a need of smart construction technique like green building and indoor thermal system.
Translucent concrete (Transparent concrete) is new technique different from normal concrete. Translucent concrete allow more light and less weight compared to normal concrete. The use of sunlight source of light instead of using electrical energy is main purpose of translucent concrete, so as to reduce the load on non- renewable sources and result it into the energy saving. Optical fibers is a sensing or transmission element, so decrease the use of artificial light, the normal concrete is replaced by translucent concrete, which has natural lighting and art design.
