What Happens When You Push Concrete Beyond Its Limits?

What happens when you pull concrete beyond its limits?

The demonstration ends sooner.

Or bend...
Mind I've seen a prestressed concrete longbow, made to demonstrate the prpoerties of concrete.

Much more impressive than that demo whish is pretty much what you'd expect.
if it had suddeny gone int fluid flow or just vapourised, that might have been a shock.

Del

Yup, turning into taffy would have been rather cute!

Crane Valve Company once had an underground bunker with a thick glass window. I bet they had some fun times watching valves, vessels, and other such components blow up.

Similar to what happened to the World Trade Twin Tower buildings in 9-11..

Reminds me of the demo Frank Lloyd Wright did, to show his concrete columns for the Johnson Wax building would bear the needed weight. He built a full-size 'lily-pad' column and loaded it with the required 12 tons of sand. Then he loaded an additional 12 tons of sand onto it, and it still held the weight. According to a Wiki article, the 21-foot high column eventually held 60 tons before cracking. This was 76 years ago (1937).

http://www.pbs.org/flw/buildings/scjohnson/scjohnson_interior.html

Immediate alarm bell: "pounds of pressure:? The writer doesn't know what he is writing about.

Concrete fails suddenly, duh, that is why we reinforce with a limited amount of steel so that the steel fails first, slowly, before the concrete.

It's merely a function of particle size. If one pushes cement through a homogeniser, one can make springs out of it.