I’m not a concrete expert, but a tonne of concrete is less than half a cubic metre.
A concrete truck carries 10 cubic yards, or nearly 18 metric tons of concrete.
If this “educational fact” is true, then that amount of sugar might cause an issue with a piece of sidewalk, but it’s unlikely to get noticed on anything being built with concrete, unless you bring a metric shit ton of sugar to the party.
As it happens, sugar appears to be added to concrete on purpose, specifically to increase the working time at the potential cost of weakening the structure, but research into that is ongoing.
Source: https://concretecaptain.com/what-does-sugar-do-to-concrete-mix/
In other words, this post is bollocks.
Edit: After it was pointed out to me by @Lupus@feddit.org that my link was slop, which I agree after reading more than the first two paragraphs, I went looking for better information and found this actual research:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221450952030036X
Interestingly during my search for information in relation to sugar added to concrete, my results appeared overwhelmingly generated by LLM, like the top link I found initially.
Also, adding sugar appears to increase the compressive strength and that might be more significant than the increased work time.
Can any concrete experts suggest another additive for us to avoid?
Not a concrete expert, but dead bodies. They decompose, can create pockets of pressurised gas, and leave a hollow cavity of no structural strength.
Source: Me. I made it up, but seems plausible.
There was an episode of MythBusters where they buried a couple pigs in concrete to see what decomposing bodies do in exactly that case. They indeed leave a gross hollow space.
According to the netflix series called High Tides that I watched the rich bury dead bodies in the buildings they build to hide them and Netflix would never lie to me
My dad told me stories of him chucking a bag of sugar into mixers when pouring slabs if the first truck was taking too long and the next truck got going too early. So a fully loaded mixer is going to need more than one bag to fuck up the whole batch. Fortunately there’s a nice cone at the top which makes it easier to chuck stuff into the mixer, I’m sure you and maybe 5 of your close friends could take one or two bags each.
In other words, this post is bollocks.
I don’t know, after reading through that AI slob of an article it says a good amount to add while still retaining sufficient strength after curing is between 0,1 to 0,5% sugar.
So let’s assume that more than 1% gets you into trouble, that’s still a lot, but sticking to your 18 tons concrete truck example - 180kg of sugar will ruin a whole truckload of concrete.
I think I could smuggle 180kg of sugar into a concrete truck without anyone noticing until it’s too late.
I’d say with enough people and dedication the story in the post could be true, not super likely but also not impossible.
2 pounds of sugar is not the same as 10 kg of sugar.
Oh yeah, the numbers in the OP are probably off, I meant the story about anarchists using the method to disrupt construction of prisons is in the realm of possibilities.
Pouring a good amount of sugar into an ICE vehicle’s gas tank will also … uh… give that car a … tummy ache.
EDIT: Water is more effective, and sand even more so.
Adding sugar doesn’t do anything beyond possibly blocking up the fuel filter. It won’t dissolve in gasoline, so it’s no more effective than sand. Water in quantity (1L or more) works great because it won’t dissolve in gasoline and is denser, so it’ll sink to the bottom of the tank and get sucked up by the fuel pump.
https://auto.howstuffworks.com/fuel-efficiency/fuel-consumption/sugar-in-gas-tank.htm
AFAIK, the whole point of adding sugar and sand to a gas tank is that they clog up the filters, and that can result in the in the engine stalling… after an indeterminate amount of time.
The idea being if you can add enough, stealthily, now the car fails without an immediately apparent time-proximal cause.
Do that to an entire motor pool, or a good chunk of it, and you can functionally force a decision between a significant amount of logistics and repair costs, and fleet downtime… or, deal with a random number of vehicles failing randomly.
Sand is… probably better at clogging up fuel pump filters faster than sugar, and if any actually gets into the actual engine, can cause more damage there.
Water, on the other hand, is more likely to rapidly cause an ICE vehicle to either sputter or stall… but you have to use a good bit more water than sand or sugar.
if you can get into fuel tank you can do so many more interesting things. chlorinated solvents will burn giving hydrogen chloride, and this will corrode everything downstream, pretty fast at that because it’s hot
also if you can fuck with fuel tank, you might be able to do the same with engine oil. fine alumina or silica added to it will cause quick weardown of moving parts that at the same time looks natural
not sure what kind of (permanent) damage water will do to engine, maybe it’ll look like it’s flooded if enough gets in
PSA: never mix bleach with gasoline
what chemical reaction is that?
Or duck duck go
My hands are kinda shaky, like, legit. I keep dropping my phone lol. Who’s to say I wouldn’t accidentally drop 2 pounds of sugar? 😉
That reminds me of when they accidentally poured concrete into the server room that controlled, I think, the Victoria line. When they realised their mistake, workers bought all the sugar around the site to pour it in before the concrete would set to make the cleanup easier.
okay so adding sugar leads to cracks in the construction I guess? this might be dangerous for carrying tensile-stressed elements like bridges or arcs, but a cracked sidewalk or flooring is not that bad.
Just chuck tomatoes in for effect, it’s funnier.
