Why use Air Entrainment in freshly poured concrete?

Volume Concrete LLC., Certificate of Compliance MasterAir®+AE+200 BASF

The key to a high quality concrete in addition to high quality cement is the admixtures. Today’s chemicals for concrete and the construction industry are suited for a variety of applications. This particular chemical is Air Entrainment from BASF.

In the process of making concrete the agitation causes a certain amount of air bubbles to be generated within the freshly mixed concrete. This amount of naturally occurring air bubbles is roughly 2% on average. The necessity to have air bubbles in concrete is due to the frost and freeze cycles we generate in Oregon.

The more air bubbles (up to a certain point), helps the concrete withstand the severity of the frost/freeze. The cold weather will cause the moisture that can be trapped within the cellular structure of concrete to freeze causing the surface to “pop off” or spalling. More air bubbles from the Air Entrainment Admix = less moisture to freeze.

Spalling concrete is bad, causes more problems down the road and thus can be avoided by adding more Air to the concrete during the mixing process. Volume Concrete LLC., uses the finest quality chemicals sourced from BASF. All the admixtures we use are compatible with themselves.

Thanks to the Crew at Roadmaster, our mixer trucks have robust measuring and calculating capabilities for correct dosage of all admixtures we carry.