It’s big. It’s beautiful and full of life. That’s Atlanta’s Georgia Aquarium, a 550,000 square foot structure of engineering genius filled with some of nature’s most fascinating creatures and a good deal of slag cement. This work of art, opened in September of 2005, received the 2006 Best Use-Beauty award from the Slag Cement Association.
 
The aquarium holds more than 8 million gallons of fresh and saltwater, and more than 100,000 fish. Six million of those gallons are in the habitat built for whale sharks, the world’s largest fish. At its largest dimensions, the habitat measures 263 feet long by 126 feet wide by 33 feet deep. The second largest habitat, with 800,000 gallons of water, was designed to simulate the natural habitat of beluga whales.

The large volume of water in all of the exhibits presented a multitude of structural design challenges, particularly in the design of exhibit tank walls and foundations. Seismic considerations of large masses of water were carefully examined for impact on the lateral resistance system and more than 2,000 augured, displacement concrete piles with capacities of up to 140 tons each were installed on this project.

The formwork challenges presented by the uniquely shaped tanks–few were rectangular, round or regular–were achieved with cast-in-place and self-consolidating (SCC) concrete.   Lafarge Building Materials, the concrete supplier, placed its Agilia® SCC in tank areas where steel was especially congested and formwork particularly tortuous.  This concrete, which contains slag cement as one of its components, easily flowed into the tight spaces and achieved strengths exceeding the 8,000 psi specification requirement. 

The highly corrosive environment in the tanks, particularly in the saltwater exhibits, required a high performance concrete mixture containing slag cement, fly ash and a corrosion inhibitor.  This combination of materials resulted in a highly impermeable concrete that minimized the potential of both sulfate attack from seawater exposure and steel corrosion initiated by ingress of chlorides. 

Slag cement was used in the project’s 70,000 cubic yards in proportions from 20 to 75 percent of the total cementitious material.  Besides the tank structures, it was used in various applications from lean backfill to 5,000 psi structural and architectural walls and columns. In addition to the binary mixtures containing slag cement, ternary mixtures of portland cement, slag cement and class F fly ash were used to reduce heat rise in mass sections of concrete.   

The Georgia Aquarium is a gift to the people of Georgia made by Bernie Marcus, co-founder of The Home Depot, and his wife Billi through the Marcus Foundation.

Project Team