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The Winter 2025 newsletter of the National Concrete Consortium (NC2) contains the following items with relevance to the ready mixed concrete industry:

• Accelerated Delivery of Concrete Paving Projects - The Winter 2025 NC² Moving Advancements into Practice (MAP) Brief from the NC² Resource Library summarizes key takeaways from the recently published Accelerated Delivery of Concrete Paving Projects. The document explores a number of project delivery strategies with a focus on the benefits, development and implementation of accelerated delivery for concrete paving projects.

• Accelerating Concrete Overlay Construction: A Case Study - This tech summary highlights an innovative project undertaken in Summer 2022 to demonstrate ways to accelerate concrete overlay construction while minimizing impacts to local traffic and ensuring a safe environment for both construction crews and the traveling public. This document offers valuable insights for agencies of all sizes around the country on effective staging, maintenance of traffic strategies and accelerated construction for concrete overlay projects.

• NCHRP Research Report 1105: Use of Marginal and Unconventional-Source Coal Ashes in Concrete - This report proposes changes to current methods of selecting coal ash for concrete construction so that ashes deemed not to meet existing standards can be considered and evaluated for use in concrete. The proposed changes focus on ash properties that impact concrete performance rather than other factors or characteristics. The findings of this report should be particularly useful to state DOTs and others involved in selecting concrete materials for highway infrastructure projects.

• Developing AI-Assisted In-Situ NDT Method for Air-Void Distribution Testing in Fresh and Hardened Concrete - This report introduces an advanced nondestructive testing (NDT) method for the in-situ detection of air voids in concrete using diffusive ultrasound. The findings of this research offer insights for enhancing concrete quality control and ensuring structural integrity in construction, particularly when the in-place air void conditions are of interest.

• Early Age Concrete Acceptance - The Tennessee Department of Transportation (TDOT) is administering a growing number of early-age concrete strength requirements due to the increased use of accelerated project delivery timelines. The main objective of this study was to establish a non-destructive procedure to predict concrete strength at early ages. For this method, the Nurse-Saul maturity function was considered with a datum temperature of 32°F (0°C).

• Durability of Concrete Using Low Slag Cement Contents - Supplemental cementitious materials (SCMs) such as fly ash, slag, silica fume and metakaolin have become commonplace in Florida concrete, particularly for high-durability or high-strength concrete. The Florida Department of Transportation (FDOT) currently allows fly ash to be used as a cement substitute at 18% to 50% replacement levels and slag cement to be used as a cement substitute at 50% to 70% replacement levels when either SCM is incorporated into binary blends for general use, mass concrete or precast concrete products in extremely aggressive environments. One of the objectives of this study was to determine the minimum amount of slag cement required to achieve durability against chloride ingress comparable to that of a control mixture containing 20% ASTM C618 Class F fly ash in a very severe sulfate attack environment.

Click here for the Winter 2025 newsletter which contains links to each of the above reports.