Filling a 1" diamter schedule 40 steel pipe with cement/concrete ?

[brian sansone]

Hello
I am trying to make a 12' wide steel pipe that will not sag when hung horizontally.
Filling with cement/concrete, or epoxy, is my first idea.
How in the world could that be accomplished?
I looked a some hand pumps with 1" output designed to pump sludge.
I have a suspicion that cement/concrete does not act or flow like sludge.

Any takers
Thanks
Brian

 

[Agent666]

Any type of high flow grout used for grouting under baseplates would probably work. Pump it in from the bottom. I'd imagine you could test feasibility rather easily by doing a full scale test.

Concrete filling it's only going to have minimal stiffness increase though. The extra weight might offset a portion of the slight increasing the stiffness. For large structural sections you might get 30% increase, I'm sure this scales to smaller sections, though I think you'd crack and crush the concrete at such a small scale with potentially larger relative displacements/curvature than a larger structural section like a concrete filled column.

You have not really mentioned the end structure/purpose, but maybe cambering the pipe or using a heavier stiffer steel section is an option to take out the sag in a predictable way?

 

[JAE]

...that will not sag when hung horizontally.

It will deflect some amount no matter what you do.

The question is how much sag can you tolerate and is it fixed in such a way that a camber, like Agent666 suggests, will work without the pipe rotating on its axis and having even more downward sag.

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[PEinc]

You really should provide better information to get a good answer. Is the pipe that you want to fill 1 inch diameter, 12 feet wide, or 12 feet long? For a small diameter pipe with a small interior volume, you can probably buy or rent a manually operated grout pump and use plain Portland cement grout with proportion of about 5 gallons of water to one 94# bag of cement. But again, we don't know what you are trying to do.

http://www.PeirceEngineering.com

 

[Tomfh]

What’s the purpose of it? And why do you want concrete full as opposed to a heavier pipe?


I’ve filled square tubes with concrete to make jacking beams to lift my house. Tubes fill easy enough. For a small tube use grout.

As for how to fill it? Stand it up, and pour it in! A rod would help compact it.

 

[Strong]

I would at least use epoxy grout (

http://www.itw-philadelphia.equip4ship.com/)

that is about 10x stronger than cement/concrete. Lay the pipe on the ground with a vertical filler head about 12" high. Slope the opposite end of pipe slightly uphill. Attach a vertical exit vent pipe about 8" high. Pour into head filler and stop when grout exits the other end. Trim and clear pipe ends after grout cures.

Walt