The average cement kiln particle size is 1.6mm. This is a huge amount of material and could be considered the most dangerous part of the production process. The cement industry has taken this into account and has created different types of cement, such as high-strength cement, which contains a higher proportion of aggregates, giving it improved structural properties.
Cement is one of those things that has no reason to exist. For example, I can build a house out of wood and nails, or out of steel and bolts. It’s as easy to do either as the other. But if I use cement, I get more work done in the same amount of time; it’s more convenient and faster to use cement than it is to use wood, steel, or nails.
The main reason for using cement is this: cement makes mortar, which does a lot of stuff that doesn’t involve making houses. So you put mortar on the inside, and then put bricks on the outside.
The choice of cement is as personal as choosing a car. It’s a choice between a very long list of materials and processes with different properties, and none of them is perfect. But there are good reasons to use cement. It’s very cheap, it can be used safely indoors, and it’s strong. It also has many other important uses. You might have been blinded by the low price of bagged cement in the store; but you need to ask yourself if you are willing to take the risk that your neighbors will be able to get away with using much cheaper cement for their own projects–and paying for your local pipe-laying department at the same time.
Cement is an industrial material, but it’s not something you just add to concrete. Cement contains reactive ingredients that change its properties during the process of making it. The process starts by adding a powder to water; then the water is added slowly while being agitated. The aim is to make a mixture which hardens into a solid mass when it cools. There are hundreds of ways this can go wrong; there have been several lawsuits over problems caused by using bags instead of using buckets or mixing too quickly or not quickly enough.
The most prominent recent lawsuit was about clinker content–the
Cement is made from limestone and clay. The clay gives it strength, while the limestone keeps it together. Most of the world’s cement comes from limestone quarried in China and India. But some comes from Italy, where the Romans were famous for making good cement.
Emperor Augustus built the Colosseum in Rome with it. Nero used it to build his palace on the Palatine Hill. The Greeks and Romans also used it to build houses and roads and aqueducts, including one that carried water from a spring called Aquae Sabiniae to Rome’s Forum, where there was a big market at that time.
But the really big use of cement was for building stone walls, especially in ancient Greece and Rome. These walls were very big, up to 20 feet thick. They were meant to keep out barbarians but not too many people could actually see them or enter them.
In the past, people have used cement to make bricks and mortar. But today the main use of cement is as a building material.
The other main use of cement is in the production of Portland cement. Portland cement is made by heating limestone to very high temperatures, then adding other ingredients that increase its strength and durability.
This is a full-time job. It takes four years to make one ton of Portland cement, and it costs about $1,200 to produce.
There are two reasons for this high cost:
One reason is that the process produces a lot of waste heat, which must be used in order to drive the temperature high enough to form the clinkers, or stone pieces left over from breaking up the limestone into finer grains during mixing.
The second reason is that Portland cement contains a lot of calcium oxide (CaO), which requires energy during its production and makes it difficult to store at room temperature without breaking down into fine particles that will clog pipes.
There are at least three kinds of cement. Edible cement is the kind you can eat, and can be used to make many different kinds of things. Playground cement is the kind that keeps your playground swing in place. For an adult playground, it also serves as a wonderful lubricant for anal sex.
For adults, the most exciting kind of cement is the kind used to build a bridge. The most exciting thing about it is that it can only be made once, and it has to be kept together by a lot of super glue until it dries out and becomes rock and no longer needs much glue.
This is why bridges are so expensive. But if you want something that lasts forever, you should use a different kind of cement that doesn’t need much glue to hold things together. This kind of cement starts out as clouds of nuclear waste that eventually assemble into rocks that don’t need much glue at all; yet it still looks like clouds of nuclear waste when you look at them from far away.