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What is Concrete?

Practical Engineering · 2.5M views · 2018-03-27 · 9:11

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Overview

Practical Engineering gives a short introduction to concrete, covering the difference between concrete and cement, the ingredients, and reinforcement. It includes a hydraulic press demonstration of compressive strength.

On Hacker News

Commenters link it as an approachable explanation of concrete basics in threads about Roman concrete, construction and sand supply.

Recommended by 2 HN people across 2 months · HN mentions 2018–2023

Topics

Civil engineering & constructionMaterials science
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concretecementreinforced concreteconstruction materialspractical engineering

What people said

walty · 2023-01 · Strong recommendation

You're going to love this playlist from Practical Engineering [1]. Grady explains all of this much better than I could. The second video explains reinforcement and the fifth explains pre-stressing. [1] [VIDEO]

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zen_of_prog · 2022-07 · Recommendation

Concrete is made up of both cement (the CONtinuous part) and aggregate/stone (the disCRETE part), so cement vs concrete is kind of like broth vs soup, and concrete and stone like soup vs vegetables. > So the main difference is that you can shape it without chiselling it. I guess, yeah. Both are really good at withstanding compressive forces. Unlike Roman times, concrete today is usually reinforced with steel rebar, which gives it good tensile strength as well. This makes it useful for a lot of things that stone is not. Disclaimer, take everything here with a grain of salt. Continuous-discrete is not the etymology of concrete. This might help too: [VIDEO]

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CGamesPlay · 2018-09 · Reference

I think that's basically plaster of paris? Practical Engineering did a good demonstration of different concrete ingredients: [VIDEO]

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Sources

Video by Practical Engineering, played through YouTube.

Data and selection notes

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HN Library: HackerTube export (2026-10-31) and open-index/hacker-news. Upstream summaries and classifications may contain AI errors.

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