UHPC is a family of concretes offering a combination of material and performance characteristics that create products with:

– Ductility, which is the ability to support tensile loads even after initial cracking
– Ultra high compressive strength (up to 200 MPa/29,000 psi)
– Extreme durability; low water to cementitious material (w/cm) ratio
– Self-consolidating and highly mouldable mixtures
– High-quality surfaces
– Flexural/tensile strength (up to 40 MPa/5,800 psi) through fibre reinforcement
– Thinner sections; longer spans; lighter weight
– New graceful product geometries
– Chloride impermeability
– Abrasion and fire resistance
– No steel reinforcing bar cages
– Minimal creep and shrinkage after curing

UHPC is structurally more comparable to steel than traditional concrete. As a result, far less material (-70%) is needed to achieve the same structural requirements. This leads to much lower weight, less substructure when used as a facade as well as lower transportation and installation costs. Additionally, beam spacing can be increased allowing for faster construction times and increased material efficiency.
In addition, because UHPC does not contain the capillary pores of traditional precast or glass-reinforced concrete, it does not absorb water and degrade in demanding freeze/thaw or marine conditions.

Traditional concrete also degrades over time, particularly in freeze thaw conditions due to spalling, cracking, and water and chloride migration through capillary action to the steel reinforcements. By contrast, UHPC is created with a very tightly-packed density of extremely small particles, carefully calibrated and mixed in a specific sequence, to produce strong molecular bonds that result not only in exceptionally high flexural strength - but it also virtually eliminates the chloride migration and water suction that cause freeze-thaw degradation and corrosion in traditional concrete structures and GFRC elements.