Category Archives: Grout

What are the various types of Grout and where are they used?

Grout is a mixture of water, cement, admixtures and sometimes fine aggregate. It is used for placement into narrow cavities such as rock fissures or holes, to fill and consolidate two adjoining objects into a solid mass.

Grout is typically categorized as either a sanded grout or a neat grout. As the name implies, a sanded grout contains cement, sand, admixtures and water, while a neat grout contains cement, admixtures and water. Sanded grouts are normally used for general void filling and neat grouts are normally used for grouting around piles, cables and post-tensioning tendons.

Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, ON

art gallery

Ontario was required to accommodate newly acquired collections, and to ensure the success of the AGO for years to come. A critical part of the project involved the design and construction of a new foundation system to support the 5-storey center-piece tower. To facilitate the construction of the tower’s foundation within the footprint of the existing structure, Isherwood Associates designed a network of micro-piles, to be installed from the original subfloor of the building to the shale bedrock 20 m (65 ft) below. The restricted access conditions also necessitated a pile design that provided extremely high strength and was small enough to allow the mini-drill rigs to be used in an area with less than 2.75 m (9 ft) of headroom.

A critical component of the micropile design was the KING MS Micropile which maximized pile strength, providing typical 28-day compressive strength breaks exceeding 60 MPa (8600 psi). Plastic properties of the MS Micropile allowed the grout to be pumped through a 0.85 mm (3/8 inch) tube, through typical pile lengths of 30 m (100 ft). Geo-Foundations Contractors Inc was able to proceed with production pile installation after testing a single, pre-production test pile which was load tested to 800 tonnes.

Geo-Foundations crews also faced logistical challenges related to the placement of concrete for underpinning areas within the central core of the building. To overcome this challenge, they chose to form and pump MS-S10 in larger sections of foundation wall and In-Pakt Precision in smaller, sections. Both of these products met the strength and pumpability requirements and the pre packaged materials allowed Geo-Foundations to produce small batches and maintain the sequencing of the underpinning work.