Previously, a yield strength of 5,000 pounds per square inch (psi) was enough for concrete to be rated as “high strength,” with the best going up to 10,000 psi. The new UHPC can withstand 40,000 psi or more.
The greater strength is achieved by turning concrete into a composite material with the addition of steel or other fibers. These fibers hold the concrete together and prevent cracks from spreading throughout it, negating the brittleness. “Instead of getting a few large cracks in a concrete panel, you get lots of smaller cracks,” says Barnett. “The fibers give it more fracture energy.”
I suspect the world would be safer if everyone just let Trump think he won.
They mean mixing in steel dust or nylon hair?
Hard to believe this is a recent enough thought.
It’s been done in mining for decades
I asked because I’ve heard such advice for bloody countryside home floors. Not even something requiring it.
Turns out that anti-cracking tech is widely applicable, if a bit expensive.
I doubt it’s a recent thought, knowing civil engineers, they’re absolute perverts when it comes to concrete.
IIRC this type of thing isn’t new - there was research into the possibility of making ships out of ice mixed with sawdust in WWII.
How is the fleet holding up?
We almost made it this time!
Oh well, let’s freeze another fleet, wait for January and try again
Sounds to me like someone is trying to justify actually using a tactical, atomic bunker buster.
tactical
Lol, they’re gonna do the strategic one next
I never really got why tactical and strategic nukes are so wildly different. Aren’t those words more or less synonyms?
It is like a rifle vs. a cannon.
Yes it is functionally the same, but the “bullet” is much much larger.
Strategic = Hiroshima getting obliterated
Tactical = The Imperial Palace is obliterated, but rest of Tokyo is mostly intact.
rest of Tokio is mostly intact
and housing becomes much more accessible too when buildings are intact but their inhabitants have much shorter lives because of radiation
Very much not.
Tactical means immediately useful. E.g. use against troops. Strategical means mediately useful. E.g. use against infrastructure and production capacity. Also massively killing civilians. This is where most heinous war crimes live.
Generally yield and intention difference, strategic takes out cities, tactical takes out factories, military bases and compounds.
Giving the yield strength in psi is the most pointless thing ever. Every single engineer would use metric Pa so its clearly a conversion for the average american idiot but the average American idiot has no idea what yield strength is.
We dropped a big boom worth 120000 hamburgers and the explosion was many football fields big. Salute to the brave troops.
Sorry bud, you’re straight up wrong. Aerospace and defense in the US very much still uses the inch-pound-second system of units.
I’m not a concrete guy, but I know that metals and composites have material properties certified for use in civil and commercial aviation are given in psi in MMPDS and CMH-17. I would be willing to bet that concrete specifications in the US are no different.
I could keep going. Our bolts are specified in ultimate tensile strength by psi. Structural steel standards use minimum yield strengths in psi. There is literally a type of steel called A36 because its minimum required yield strength is 36,000 psi.
Yeah psi is a pretty common unit and trivial to swap between if SI is needed.
Arguments like above often show a lack of real world experience.
I prefer my mechanical stress calculations in millidynes per square kiloparsec thank you very much.
Your comment is informative but now all I can hear in my head is Green Day’s “American Idiot”.
Holy nothing burger, Batman!
First off, this article is from 2022, re-released to farm clicks from the current hype cycle.
Secondly, this is conjecture on top of conjecture. They discuss that we can’t know the current damage from satellite, and Iran down plays the damage. Then they go on to say “concrete is strong and can be stronger”.
Articles like this annoy me. It’s all based on lots of unsubstantiated claims, and then one guy’s theoretical research. We don’t know the strength of the bombs. We don’t know the strength of Iran’s bunkers. We don’t know how much damage was done. None of this has changed. I doubt we’ll ever really know. But throw whatever political spin on it you want, and now you’ve got a click worthy news article.
There’s also the fact that the majority of Iran’s nuclear facilities were built before UHPC, the concrete discussed in the article, was available!
In the late 2000s, for instance, rumors circulated about a bunker in Iran struck by a bunker-buster bomb. The bomb had failed to penetrate—and remained embedded in—the surface of the bunker, presumably until the occupants called in a bomb-disposal team. Rather than smashing through the concrete, the bomb had been unexpectedly stopped dead. The reason was not hard to guess: Iran was a leader in the new technology of Ultra High Performance Concrete, or UHPC, and its latest concrete advancements were evidently too much for standard bunker busters.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fordow_Fuel_Enrichment_Plant
Construction on the facility started in 2006, but the existence of the enrichment plant was only disclosed to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) by Iran on 21 September 2009,[6][7] after the site became known to Western intelligence services. Western officials strongly condemned Iran for not disclosing the site earlier;
Seems to fall into the same timeframe.
I was suspicious of that as well, but I’m not knowledgeable enough on that subject to speak on it, so didn’t include it. But I doubt any country can build that extensive of a nuclear factory in so few years.
I thought we do know the depth of the bunkers though. And that American bombs can’t go that deep, even multiple of them
I can’t speak to that aspect. But I firmly believe that if our military planned and carried out this strike, then we had very good evidence that their bunkers were at a depth these ordinance could reach.
The US intelligence community kept asserting that Iran is not pursuing a nuclear weapon as late as Spring 2025.
Nothing of this was based on consistent intelligence.
Consider who actually makes this decision, in this case. It’s highly likely our intelligence assessment here is very accurate orr flat out denied by the dipshits actually making the call if it’s not what they want to hear.
Like they did publicly. On this conflict. To the press.
Why would we bother with that level of analysis just to distract people from ICE raids?
That concrete really isn’t new and really isn’t that special. There’s a reason they built it under a mountain - because the mountain does what concrete can’t.
It is not that it can do what concrete cannot. It is just that digging a tunnel under a mountain is much easier than making a mountain out of concrete.
Nothing is unbreakable.
And no bomb is irresistible.
That’s why we need the Orbital Ion Cannon.
Sorry no tiberian. This is generals timeline. Need partical cannon.
Goddamn GDI bootlicker!
I did NOD see that coming.
You can’t win, Kane!
“Hey there, you sexy bomb… I can’t stay away!”
You triggered a thought: what if those bunker busters carried a payload of corrosive material, something that the explosive event could deeply embed into the concrete, slowly degrading its strength - possibly until total failure?
What material would that be? Corrosives have limits, they can’t just keep dissolving stuff forever.
And what would “total failure” look like? It’s a mountain, it’s not going to just collapse into goo.
Blood of xenomorphs from the Alien movies
That’s a work of fiction. You might as well suggest dropping lightsabres on the bunker.
Corrosives have limits, they can’t just keep dissolving stuff forever.
Thus, the explosive assist for initial penetration. The type would depend on the composition of the concrete, you’d probably be more successful targeting the tension strength of the fibers or metals instead of the compression strength of the cement.
And what would “total failure” look like? It’s a mountain, it’s not going to just collapse into goo.
You don’t need goo, you just need enough weakening that it no longer supports the 250’ of loose rubble atop it and collapses into the interior space.
Coreium.
We drop an overloading nuclear reactor on top of the complex, and let the radioactive core China-Syndrome itself straight through, rendering the entire area uninhabitable for thousands of years.
My first thought is actually getting the corrosive substance onto enough of the concrete would be difficult, assuming they aren’t able to penetrate the concrete then they have to rely on it seeping from the ground, or if they can penetrate then the substance is only really going to be in the chamber where the buster detonated.
I have zero experience with ordnance or busting bunkers though so that’s just a shot in the dark
My first thought is actually getting the corrosive substance onto enough of the concrete would be difficult
Yeah, if the concrete is 40’ thick and they’re only getting 10’ of penetration with the explosives, then this isn’t going to do much. But if it’s 20’ thick and they got through the first 12 with HE, the remaining 8 are going to have a lot of cracks to admit slow liquid death.
I have zero information on what the reinforcers are in the concrete, so shot in the dark is about right. Glass might be tough - unless you could deliver hydrofluoric acid effectively. Metals - we’re not going to want to wait for iron to oxidize, looks like hydrogen embrittlement with HF again - so maybe that’s the magic sauce. Nasty stuff, but that’s what weapons manufacturers are good at handling and packaging: nasty stuff.
2000 lbs of HF poured on the surface isn’t going to do much to the buried chamber, but 2000 lbs of HF delivered into the freshly stressed and heavily cracked concrete layer under all the dirt - that could be a problem for future use of the facility.
Except copeium.
Except for my spirit.
You can’t break what is already broken
Someone, somewhere, said they don’t like you.
Now CRY!
Everyone likes me.
From this article it sounds very likely that the bunker buster attack failed.
The article is 3 years old
But the information still seems valid.
It’s confirming your bias so you like it…
And I read that the US used more than half of its stock of these bunker-buster bombs in this attack, the largest conventional bunker-busters in existence. So they can’t simply try again.
By your math, they absolutely can simply try again: one more time.
By my math, the bunker-buster bomb makers just got a big new contract.
something something DOGE of WAR something…
They can try one more time but worse
I mean they usually only do about 30 damage anyways.
So Iran knew EXACTLY how strong they needed to make their defenses!
Pretty stupid of the American military to give that info to a game developer, that would obviously use it.I love how unhinged random fan wikis sound without context. Here for instance: Bunker Buster, see also: Concrete Donkey and Buffalo of Lies
I hadn’t clicked the link yet, but Concrete Donkey told me what it was immediately
Why? The kinds of UHPC being discussed in the article weren’t available even in the United States until the year 2000 but most of Iran’s nuclear facilities were built between 1974 and 2005. Even their primary enrichment facility in Fordow, which was struck with MOPs, was started no earlier than the mid-2000s as it was still unfinished in 2009.
Basically the majority of Iran’s facilities, even their major ones, are too old to have the kind of concrete being discussed in the article.
My guess: that bunker buster attack was twice as successful as the missile attack on the the airfield in Qatar.
2 x 0 = 0.
Now accepting bets on when we will find out that Trump had a secret call with Ali Khamenei where they negotiated the whole thing ahead of time, thus explaining the movement of the Uranium out of the facility, the movement of our servicemen out of the airbase, etc. etc.
That’s what they want you to think, but we have no evidence to either direction. And I doubt we will ever have a definitive answer.
Impressive.
Basically they used pyramid age tech to outplay billions of dollars worth of weapons tech.
Arguably letting a big weight fall down after being brought into the air somehow is also pyramid age tech.
These bombs are not just dead weights. These bunker busters are equipped with precision guidance and fly to and hit a person on the head if they desired. It’s also designed to deliver a huge explosion AFTER it penetrates with the kinetic impact.
It can also be set to explode right before impact, like Israel really likes to do when attaching residential high-rises, to deliver maximum destruction and death.
Hardly. Did you read the article?
The greater strength is achieved by turning concrete into a composite material with the addition of steel or other fibers.
Fiber reinforcment is thousands of years old.
Calling that pyramid age I think is a little disingenuous, they didn’t have 40,000 psi concrete back in those days.
Thats fair yeah
So I did not read the article because of a paywall I’m too lazy to circumvent right now
But from OP’s summary, the main technology they’re talking about is concrete reinforced with steel or other fibers.
And that’s definitely more advanced than “pyramid age”
But it’s also pretty much a direct descendant of mud brick reinforced with straw which humanity has been using since well before the pyramids. Same basic concept, different materials.
So yes and no.
Yes…no…maybe? I don’t know. Can you repeat the question?
Egyptians stacked blocks of stone to build the pyramids.
Roman concrete was impressively strong.
Neither of them had steel-reinforced concrete.
Neither did Gothic cathedrals, which is why they needed flying buttresses.
Reinforced concrete as we know it today is a 19th century innovation, as I understand it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinforced_concrete?wprov=sfla1
Maybe the commenter was thinking of adobe.
And this tech goes way beyond merely “reinforced”.
I sure would like to read this article, it seems fascinating, but it’s paywalled.
They used nagarjuna cement
Just one followup question: Who cares?
I low key assume this means the next strike will be using tactical nukes. This is bad news folks.
Don’t give any voice whatsoever to the concept that nukes might possibly be acceptably used, anywhere, anytime, for any reason.
…please don’t give them ideas.
Ha ha yea go iran! Fuck the west and their imperialist bull!
Go Iran? Really? Such a privileged life you live.
Nobody more privileged than the supporters of western imperialism.
