Everything you want to know about Concrete - Concrete Floating

Everything you want to know about Concrete - Concrete Finishing

Everything you want to know about Concrete - Concrete Joints

Everything you want to know about Concrete - Concrete Curing

Concrete Glossary

Air-Entrained Concrete: Concrete containing microscopic air bubbles generated by the use of an air-entraining admixture to improve resistance to freezing and thawing.

Bleeding: The rising of water to the surface of freshly placed concrete.

Blisters: Shallow, dome-shaped surface defects on a flat work surface, seldom apparent until after the first troweling.  Created when entrapped air bubbles rise and swell a thin layer of the surface concrete.

Crazing: The overall pattern of random hairline cracks in a concrete surface caused by drying and shrinkage stresses.

Curled Slab: Curling is the distortion (rising up) of a slab's corners or edges due to differences in moisture content or temperature between the top and bottom of a slab.

Delamination: Delaminated areas of surface mortar result from bleed water and bleed air being trapped below the prematurely closed mortar surface.  Bleeding has NOT occurred and the water is trapped below the surface.

Dry Shake: A dry mixture of cement with special mineral or metallic aggregates used to produce a hard monolithic surface.  A dry shake with a pigment will produce a colored surface.

Dusting: The appearance on the surface of hardenedd concrete of a powdery material coming from the concrete itself.

Laitance: A weak, milky layer of cement and sand fines that rises to the surface over wet concrete and mixes with bleed water, usually a result of premature finishing.

Mortar: In concrete work, the mixture of cement paste and fine aggregate.  In coatings, epoxy mortars combine fine aggregate with an epoxy for increased strength or chemical resistance.

Nonslip Aggregates: Commonly silicon carbide or aluminum oxide grains applied as a dry shake to produce a nonslip finish.

Scaling: Scaling is a scabrous condition where the surface mortar has peeled away, usually exposing the coarse aggregate.

Spalling: The flaking away of the surface of a hardened concrete slab to a depth of about 1/16 to 3/16 inch, but it can be much deeper with loss of coarse aggregate.