Partially true? Firstly- “cement” and “concrete” aren’t the same thing. Concrete contains cement generally. The reaction between cement and sugar is closer to what this describes, as cement has a stronger negative reaction and is easier to make “indefinitely plastic” ie “never set” than concrete. The exact details depend on the specific cement or concrete, as there is more than one type of each with different properties and reactions. In general sugar acts to retard concrete setting- to slow it down. Construction workers or transporters may add sugar themselves to the mixture in order to slow its setting. Some examples might be on a hot day (when concrete might set too fast- reducing working time and possibly causing it to crack from the effects of rapid setting like heat and contraction. Another example might be if there is an unforeseen delay and they need to extend the working life of the concrete. Up to a point, concrete that takes longer to set tends to set harder, so if…
.. strength is desired such as for a fortified or load bearing structure of concrete- they may retard it with sugar or another compound anyway to help the finished product.
With most concrete you are more realistically looking at something like 1-2% of the total weight of the concrete in sugar to have enough sugar present to effectively prevent the concrete from setting “indefinitely.” A small amount of sugar like a few tenths of a percent of total weight might slow the setting of many common concretes by maybe an hour or two.
So a ton of concrete is probably going to need closer to 40lbs of sugar to have a good chance to delay the reaction indefinitely.
Wether that matters or not is another story as far as stopping construction- and here is why:
You have to mix concrete. If you just dump sugar in it is o my going to impact the area the sugar is able to chemically react to- if you don’t mix it- that area can be pretty small. Now, that CAN ruin a project and CAN require less…
.. sugar to pull off because you aren’t trying to ruin the entire batch of concrete- you’re only trying to ruin a small part so that whatever is being formed with have a defect, a weak point. So if you don’t mix the sugar into the ton of concrete, you may be only ruining a few or tens of pounds of concrete- which 1-2% of 200lbs would be 2lbs of sugar. This is where it becomes a matter of circumstances and planning etc. if a crew is forming a critical load bearing or stressed structure from concrete, having just one spot that won’t harder could ruin the structures integrity and require they remove the entire thing and start over. For non critical load bearing or stressed constructions, they can simply remove the plastic concrete and pour some more in the fill the gap. They can also possibly add retarder to the entire volume to give them time to remove the contaminated concrete and pour more, and then retard that so that it all dries at the same time and they could still possibly…
.. salvage a critical load bearing or stressed concrete structure contain images this way.
If they were pouring a large singular concrete construction like a foundation, waiting until it was “half poured” etc and adding your sugar AS concrete is dumped on top could create a problem. A “pocket” of plastic concrete that won’t dry may form in the middle and to get to the plastic concrete would require the removal of the material they already poured on top, and there might not be a good way to know where exactly the contaminated concrete was at to be able to remove it and retard the mix to try and save things. This again only works if the engineering penciled out to where that structural defect would be a likely failure point. The adding of new concrete on top could help the mixing of your sugar into the larger mass as well- which isn’t actually a good thing for the desired goal of sabotage necessarily since if you threw in 2 lbs that might be enough to ruin 20 lbs of concrete around…
.. the sugar, but if the pouring action causes it to mix into a larger mass your 2lbs may be diluted to the point it just acts as retarder and doesn’t have the desired effect. So for best results with that method you’d probably want to be able to dump a lot of sugar very quickly. All told it may even be a better strategy to dump accelerator into the mix- a compound that speeds up the setting of concrete or cement. As we said earlier- if concrete sets too quickly it is prone to cracking etc. just as slowing the setting times tends to make the finished concrete stronger, accelerating it tends to make it weaker. That weakening coupled with the cracking has a better shot of success perhaps than trying to make the concrete indefinitely plastic. Especially true if you don’t know the type or don’t have diffident sugar or means to get sufficient sugar in before being stopped. Sugar has been documented to be able to act as an accelerator as well as a retardant- so adding sugar could possibly
..ruin the cement through acceleration- but where sugar is noted as acting as an accelerant it is often in amounts approaching or exceeding 2x the amount of sugar required to retard a given volume of concrete. Sugar tends to be cheap and easier to get than industrial concrete accelerant or retarder, but you do need sufficient volume and the right circumstances to take advantage of it.lllmto sabotage concrete.
With most concrete you are more realistically looking at something like 1-2% of the total weight of the concrete in sugar to have enough sugar present to effectively prevent the concrete from setting “indefinitely.” A small amount of sugar like a few tenths of a percent of total weight might slow the setting of many common concretes by maybe an hour or two.
So a ton of concrete is probably going to need closer to 40lbs of sugar to have a good chance to delay the reaction indefinitely.
Wether that matters or not is another story as far as stopping construction- and here is why:
You have to mix concrete. If you just dump sugar in it is o my going to impact the area the sugar is able to chemically react to- if you don’t mix it- that area can be pretty small. Now, that CAN ruin a project and CAN require less…
If they were pouring a large singular concrete construction like a foundation, waiting until it was “half poured” etc and adding your sugar AS concrete is dumped on top could create a problem. A “pocket” of plastic concrete that won’t dry may form in the middle and to get to the plastic concrete would require the removal of the material they already poured on top, and there might not be a good way to know where exactly the contaminated concrete was at to be able to remove it and retard the mix to try and save things. This again only works if the engineering penciled out to where that structural defect would be a likely failure point. The adding of new concrete on top could help the mixing of your sugar into the larger mass as well- which isn’t actually a good thing for the desired goal of sabotage necessarily since if you threw in 2 lbs that might be enough to ruin 20 lbs of concrete around…