A key product and an evergreen for over 50 years
PCI Emulsion
When the company PCI was founded under the name Polychemie GmbH in 1950, the construction industry was concentrating on repairing the damage done by the war to the building substance that had survived. It was a considerable problem to bond fresh mortar or concrete to older concrete safely and permanently. PCI found the answer in an aqueous plastic compound for modifying hydraulic bonding agents and granular aggregates. It was added to the water used to mix the mortar. This concrete bonding agent was given the name PCI-Emulsion.
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Multipurpose mortar additive
PCI-Emulsion rapidly became an indispensable key product, a universally popular and very versatile agent for building repairs. Even though over the years specialty products have been developed, e.g. ready-mixed repair mortars, concrete fillers and mortar bonding agents, PCI Emulsion still maintains its position; as an additive on site-mixed mortar, it is saponification resistant, improves bonding of slurries, has a plasticizing effect on mortars and plasters, increases resistance to wear and abrasion and to water, oil and salt solutions, improves bending tensile strength and ensures crack-free curing.
With the boom in concrete renovation that took place in the 1980s and the fall of the Berlin Wall, which was followed by much building and repair work in the new German states, PCI Emulsion has continued to maintain its position on the market. For more than half a century, PCI Emulsion, the oldest milestone and evergreen from PCI Augsburg GmbH, has been successfully used on countless building structures all over the world. |
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| Refurbishing building structures | |
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A sample application - Abu Simbel
A particularly interesting example of a special application for this mortar additive, based on a modified synthetic resin dispersion is the famous temple buildings of Abu Simbel in Egypt. The construction of the Aswan dam (1960 - 1971), an object of national prestige for the Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, threatened to sink these temple buildings in the Nile, which was dammed up to a height of 30 meters. However, in an undertaking financed by UNESCO, the temple buildings were “relocated” to a point 65 meters higher and approximately 180 meters further inland. In November 1963, the Abu Simbel Joint Venture – an international conglomerate of companies under the overall control of Hochtief AG – received the contract to move the temple. |
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| The Abu Simbel Temple in Egypt | |
After the large cliff face temple had been disassembled into 807 blocks and the small temple into 235 blocks and both had been correctly reconstructed, the experts for Egyptian antiquities were faced with the task of sealing thousands of meters of vertical and horizontal joints with sand-based paste in different colors. To do this, stones were ground by hand with hydraulic chalk and mixed with water and PCI emulsion to make different colored pastes to match the original color of the stone exactly. After the joints had been sealed, it was impossible to see that the temples had been broken up into many individual blocks. In this way, PCI Emulsion had made a contribution to the highly successful “relocating” of Ramses II’s cliff temples in Abu Simbel.