Juan David Bedoya, Marketing Manager at the Arawak Cement Company.
The Arawak Cement Company Limited has been working with Dr. Davide Zampini, Managing Director of the Cemex Research Group, to bring on stream a number of new cement and concrete products which make use of new advances in technology and Barbadians will soon benefit from what the company has to offer.
Juan David Bedoya, Marketing Manager at the Arawak Cement Company acknowledged the above this week, as he spoke with The Barbados Advocate following a Breakfast Seminar held at the Hilton Hotel by his company, in collaboration with the Barbados Institute of Architects, to explore the topic, “Advances in the Precast Concrete Industry”.
“We already have the admixtures (also known as additives for the cement). They arrived in Barbados by mid-October. We are right now running the tests in our ready mix operation for us to start working on the self-compacting concrete,” Bedoya said of one of the products to come on stream.
“We are going to be doing a hands on workshop with the contractors back in our plant. What we are doing right now is, we are renovating the whole entrance to the Arawak Cement Plant, including the technology that we just showcased at BMEX and that is going to include the rapid hardening and the self-compacting technologies (amongst others), that we are showing,” he added.
“So we are going to be showcasing all of these in late November, early December, and we are going to push for this technology to be available on the market as early as January,” Bedoya further commented.
Ian Dash, Consultant for the Precast Division of the Arawak Cement Company Limited, meanwhile highlighted, the need for advances in concrete technology.
“You know, concrete technology, it’s always advancing. Only recently, in the last ten years, concrete had always had a problem with spoiling in salty or saline conditions and with the moisture getting into the reinforcing steel and rusting the reinforcing steel, and then the rust would expand and the concrete would fall off and there would be failure,” he observed.
“Now we have admixtures which we can add to the concrete… to seal it and make it virtually impermeable, and we can now build by the seaside like up in Ocean City and at the Crane and other places, without having to worry about falling concrete and rusting steel,” he said, noting that the newer technologies will soon become standard in the construction industry. (RSM)