I just finished a book describing the building of Boulder Dam, and there's something I don't understand. The book mentioned that two concrete batch plants were made, one to product "low-mix" concrete for the lower portions of the dam and another to produce "high-mix" concrete for the top.
The two plants were not run at the same time. Any ideas as to why they needed two separate plants and what the difference in the concrete was?
This is somewhat speculation, and some bit of foggy memory so somebody that really is up on this feel free to disabuse me.
From what I understand the engineers needed one monolithic block of concrete when all was said and done so the lower portions were blended to cure real slowly so the end result would be no seams. Also the lower part of the damn is much thicker than the upper part but the concrete mixture had to be adjusted to maintain a steady cure rate and the thinner sections having less cross section had to be a hotter mix than the lower part because the heat generated from the chemical reaction was disapated faster in the thinner sections.
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