Original Paper(Vol.54 No.8 pp.736-741)

Effect of Dosage of Pigment on the Surface Color of Concrete

Takashi FUJII, Akihiro FUJIKI, Hidekazu TANAKA and Toshiki AYANO

Abstract:Ordinary concrete structures are colorless and monotony. Therefore, they give an artificial and dreary impression. Many approaches for harmonizing concrete with surrounding landscape have been investigated. The coloring concrete is an approach to provide concrete with a favorable impression. The various highlights and contrasts of the scene may enable to readily distinguish elements from one another and to pick those that are most important to us at the moment. The pigment for coloring concrete, whose main component is iron oxide, can give any color without white and blue. The pigment whose main component is chrome oxide makes the color of concrete blue. The pigment whose main component is titanium oxide makes the color of concrete white. Furthermore, carbon black gives black color. When some types of pigment are mixed, the variation of concrete color is expected to be spread much more. In this paper, the effect of the dosage and the type of pigment on the color of concrete is discussed. The method to estimate the lightness and color shade of the color-conditioned concrete is proposed. The proposed method can be also available for the estimation of the color-conditioned concrete with several types of pigments. Normal Portland cement concrete and high volume blast furnace slag cement concrete were used for test.

Key Words:Color-conditioned concrete, Lightness, Color shade, Pigment, Surface color