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I’m not a concrete expert, but a tonne of concrete is less than half a cubic metre.
A concrete truck carries 10 cubic yards, or nearly 18 metric tons of concrete.
If this “educational fact” is true, then that amount of sugar might cause an issue with a piece of sidewalk, but it’s unlikely to get noticed on anything being built with concrete, unless you bring a metric shit ton of sugar to the party.
As it happens, sugar appears to be added to concrete on purpose, specifically to increase the working time at the potential cost of weakening the structure, but research into that is ongoing.
Source: https://concretecaptain.com/what-does-sugar-do-to-concrete-mix/
In other words, this post is bollocks.
Edit: After it was pointed out to me by @Lupus@feddit.org that my link was slop, which I agree after reading more than the first two paragraphs, I went looking for better information and found this actual research:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221450952030036X
Interestingly during my search for information in relation to sugar added to concrete, my results appeared overwhelmingly generated by LLM, like the top link I found initially.
Also, adding sugar appears to increase the compressive strength and that might be more significant than the increased work time.
In other words, this post is bollocks.
I don’t know, after reading through that AI slob of an article it says a good amount to add while still retaining sufficient strength after curing is between 0,1 to 0,5% sugar.
So let’s assume that more than 1% gets you into trouble, that’s still a lot, but sticking to your 18 tons concrete truck example - 180kg of sugar will ruin a whole truckload of concrete.
I think I could smuggle 180kg of sugar into a concrete truck without anyone noticing until it’s too late.
I’d say with enough people and dedication the story in the post could be true, not super likely but also not impossible.
Can any concrete experts suggest another additive for us to avoid?
Not a concrete expert, but dead bodies. They decompose, can create pockets of pressurised gas, and leave a hollow cavity of no structural strength.
Source: Me. I made it up, but seems plausible.
There was an episode of MythBusters where they buried a couple pigs in concrete to see what decomposing bodies do in exactly that case. They indeed leave a gross hollow space.
According to the netflix series called High Tides that I watched the rich bury dead bodies in the buildings they build to hide them and Netflix would never lie to me
I mean your username is literally “towerful” so I expect you to know something about towers that don’t collapse, I guess?
2 lbs of sugar would fit in two Venti size drink cups.
1 ton of concrete wouldn’t fill up a VW beetle.
So if you want to sabotage even a small office building, you’re gonna need a fuckload of sugar.
A concrete truck can hold up to about 50000lbs or 25 tons so you only need 50lbs of sugar to ruin a truck load. That sounds like a pretty easy amount to throw into a concrete truck
It might not sound like much, but the French people who committed the prison concrete sabotage weren’t ordinary people who showed up with sugar in their pockets, they were a well organized group that had also broken into offices to steal construction plans. One of their documents describes sabotaging the concrete as “a simple matter” of adding sugar, but that’s all - it doesn’t say whether they added it to a running truck (which would be quite a trick because everybody on a truck crew knows who’s in the crew) or mixed it dry with sacks of concrete in a storeroom, or what. It also doesn’t mention observing any actual results. People’s vision of how this would work is way too simple - “Just toss a 50-lb bag of something into a truck!”
How am I expected to be able to afford a fuckload of sugar in this economy?
That depends where the concrete was going to be used. On the first floor of a multi floor building? Will probably cause some structural issues after it’s nearly build or fully built.
Pouring a good amount of sugar into an ICE vehicle’s gas tank will also … uh… give that car a … tummy ache.
EDIT: Water is more effective, and sand even more so.
This gets posted so often, but it really doesn’t work unfortunately.
Sugar can delay how long concrete takes to set, but it’s an insignificant amount of time (~2 hours maybe), and then the concrete when it sets is stronger.
