Shrinkage Cone - Shrinkage and Expansion Tester

Shrinkage Cone - Cement and Concrete shrinkage and expansion tester

The Shrinkage cone is designed with a double wall metal vessel for easy heating and cooling using an external liquid temperature control unit. A laser beam measures the very early shrinkage and expansion of building materials, cement and concrete: touch free and with 1 micron resolution.
With the patented innovation of the Shrinkage Cone deltaEL it is possible to measure the shrinkage or expansion of fluid building materials in the first minutes and hours after start of mixing. The expansion of the building material is registered touch-free and very exact by a laser beam. There is no mechanical coupling between the fluid and the sensor.
To ensure that the measured distance correlates with the relative length change of the material we use a specially designed specimen container.
The length change is registered with a resolution of 1/10 micron and the measurement values are digitized and stored by the software delivered with the system. Synchronous with the length change, temperature, rel. humidity may be stored by the software.

Measurement Procedure

• Fill the fluid building material (2) into the cone formed specimen container (1)
• The container is set under the laser unit (3), which is mounted on a high performance boom stand.
• With a rack and pinion the distance is preset to about . 0 µm .
• The automatic offset adjust is done by a mouse click on your PC (5).
• An autonomous data logger will register your data for several weeks on an integrated CF-card memory
• The data-logger has a network interface. You can easily readout the data, with any browser software like Internet-Explorer or Firefox