The Lafarge Technical Centre in Toronto is a LEED Gold designed and certified ready mix concrete laboratory and technical facility dedicated to the design and development of innovative concrete materials, as well as serving as a demonstration showcase for those materials.
From the street, the rather plain exterior of a building on the edge of Lake Ontario in Toronto’s industrial Port Lands gives little indication of the research work being conducted inside.
It operates in a former warehouse on Lafarge Eastern Canada’s cement terminal lands which the company converted in late 2010.
“There was definitely a need for it (the centre),” says marketing and communications Heather Adamick, explaining the research supports the work of the company’s 90 Eastern Canadian concrete plants.
This past December, Lafarge received a Materials Development and Innovation Award from the Ready Mixed Concrete Association of Ontario for the innovative use of several concrete materials in the conversion, as well as for the ongoing research, she points out.
Some of those materials included Agilia, a self-consolidating concrete, to build the core structure and the exposed interior partition walls, and Extensia for the floor slab in the main testing area.
“This product is an integral element to the building’s function, as a heavy duty floor slab was deemed necessary for long-term performance.”
Those building components provide a visual demonstration of the research objectives the staff strives for on a daily basis, says product development technician Lara Yousif.
And it’s a very small staff, says Yousif who assumed her position less than a year ago after graduating from the civil engineering program at Ryerson University. Although university students are hired during the summer and the centre hopes to add to its staff, currently there are only three full-time employees. The others are manager Abdurahman Lotfy and quality control technician Amr Omar.
Noting that “everyone knows how to do conventional concrete”, Yousif explains the centre’s mission is to enhance and promote the uses of speciality concrete. The Extensia concrete which was used for the centre’s floor slab, for example, it a low shrinkage concrete ideal for warehouse slabs because it won’t crack and create depressions.
The research might be described as a local adaptation of international directives. New concrete mixes developed at Lafarge’s headquarters in France are tested and adapted for the Canadian market using local sand, gravel, and other materials.
For example, if Lafarge’s Burlington plant has to prepare concrete for a project in that city, aggregates from that city will be tested. And Yousif makes the decision on the quantity and ratio of the ingredients. That’s first done through a computer simulation and then physically pouring the ingredients into a ready mix hopper.
“You have to be patient,” says Yousif on the experiments which sometimes only requires two mixes to achieve the correct mix, but can take up to as many as six. The concrete’s “fresh properties” are tested for slump, air, and density.
Later, in its hard form, the concrete is analyzed for compression, strength and viscosity in the centre’s testing laboratory by Omar.
Concrete tested in the centre is now being used all over North America. The centre is heavily involved in exploring the potential of FINA, a very thin concrete which can be used for topping tiles, she says.
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