1. What is the dry & wet volume of the concrete?
Concrete is made up of 4 main ingredients. They are fine aggregates, coarse aggregates, cement, and water. When we mix these ingredients as per the concrete grade, without adding water to them, we call that mixture, a dry volume of concrete.
When water is added to these dry concrete mixes, the resulting homogeneous mixture i.e. ready to use is said as a wet concrete mix.
2. What is the dry volume of 1 cum of wet concrete?
Consider a concrete cube of 1 cum in volume.
We have to add 54% extra to get the dry volume of the concrete.
So, dry concrete volume = 1cum. of wet concrete + 54% of wet concrete volume.
= 1cum + (54÷ 100)× 1cum
= 1cum+ 0.54 cum
= 1.54 cum.
3. Why we have added 54% extra to the wet volume of the concrete?
When we mix the concrete ingredients in dry conditions, they contain voids in them with loosely filled materials. When water is added, they form a homogeneous mix and get compacted by removing all the voids present in them. So the wet concrete reduces in its volume and 52 to 54% of extra material is needed to make up this volume reduction by voids filling, and to have dense and compacted concrete.
When we estimate the volume of the concrete structure, we get the volume of the wet concrete. So, we have to convert this into dry mix concrete volume, while batching and preparing the concrete.
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