About MC-Bauchemie Emcekrete

Emcekrete is not one product but a graded family of MC-Bauchemie’s cementitious precision grouts, and choosing the right member of that family is most of the actual engineering. Underneath a rotating machine, a bridge bearing or a precast column there is almost never a perfectly parallel, dry, load-ready gap waiting for grout — there is a rough, damp, awkwardly shaped void that has to be filled in one continuous pour without air pockets, without shrinkage cracks opening as it cures, and without losing working time if the shutdown window is six hours rather than six days. MC-Bauchemie built the range around a dual shrinkage-compensation mechanism — a swelling additive plus a separate compensating agent working together — so the grout expands slightly while still plastic and holds that contact as it hardens, instead of pulling away from the underside of the baseplate the way an ordinary sand-cement mix tends to. The family is graded by set speed and flow rather than sold as a single SKU: Emcekrete 50 is the slow-hardening, low-heat-of-hydration grade for large-volume pours; Emcekrete 60 is the universal, general-purpose grade most specifiers reach for first; Emcekrete 70 FH/DBS and the Super-fast grouts compress the programme for tight shutdown windows; and Emcekrete 100/WP 108 is the high-performance, high-flow grade for the heaviest loads, including wind-turbine tower bases.

For a Delhi NCR or Pan-India project, that grading matters more than the name on the bag. Space Arc Engineering, as an authorised MC-Bauchemie distributor and applicator, gets asked most often not “which grout” but “which grade of this grout” — because a fast-setting grade poured in June heat behaves very differently from the same product poured on a January night shift, and getting that wrong on a single-shot machine-base pour is an expensive thing to discover after the fact. Emcekrete is chloride-free and pumpable to EN 934-1, water-impermeable to EN 12390-8, rated non-combustible to EN 13501-1 Class A1, and the range carries DAfStb-guideline certification for cementitious grouting mortars and concrete alongside EN 1504-6 certification as an anchoring product — credentials that matter on power-plant, metro, cement-plant and heavy-industrial contracts where the consultant’s specification calls for them by name, not just a generic “non-shrink grout” line item.

The technical insight

The detail worth checking on any “non-shrink” grout, Emcekrete included, is which shrinkage-compensation mechanism it actually uses, because the term gets used loosely in the market. A plastic-expansion additive alone (typically a metal-powder gas-forming agent) fights early plastic shrinkage but does little once the grout has set; a hardened-state compensating agent alone does the opposite. MC-Bauchemie documents both mechanisms working together across the Emcekrete range, plus independent verification through EN 934-1 (chloride content and pumpability), EN 12390-8 (water permeability under pressure) and CDF freeze-thaw/de-icing-salt testing — Emcekrete 50 recorded scaling of roughly 260 g/m² and Emcekrete 100 roughly 141 g/m² after 28 freeze-thaw cycles, both comfortably inside the CDF method’s high-resistance band. That combination of a genuine dual mechanism plus third-party test data is the practical way to tell a purpose-engineered precision grout apart from a repackaged non-shrink cement.

Where it is used

• Machine and equipment baseplate grouting (motors, compressors, presses, pumps)
• Bridge bearing grouting
• Crane rail grouting
• Cavities and rigid joints between precast concrete elements
• Sleeve/pocket foundation column grouting
• Structural repair grouting where an R4-class repair mortar is specified (Emcekrete 50, per EN 1504-3)
• Wind-turbine tower base grouting (Emcekrete 100/WP 108 grade)
• Anchor bolt and bolt-hole fixing, certified as an anchoring product to EN 1504-6

Key advantages

• Ready-to-use, single-component — gauge with water on site, no risk of an under-trained crew getting the cement-sand ratio wrong
• Dual swelling-plus-compensation shrinkage control keeps the grout in full contact under the baseplate rather than pulling away as it cures
• Chloride-free and pumpable to EN 934-1, so it’s safe to place near reinforcement and embedded anchor bolts
• Water-impermeable to EN 12390-8, protecting exposed or partially buried grout beds from moisture ingress
• Non-combustible, EN 13501-1 Class A1 — relevant next to hot machinery and power equipment
• Certified anchoring product to EN 1504-6, engineered specifically for bolt and anchor fixing rather than repurposed gap-fill grout
• Graded across five set-speed options (50 / 60 / 70 FH-DBS / Super-fast / 100-WP108), so the shutdown window can be matched to the grade instead of the grade being forced to fit the window
• High resistance to frost and de-icing-salt attack demonstrated by CDF testing, relevant for exposed bridge bearings and outdoor machine bases

Limitations & considerations

• It is a graded range, not a single formulation — layer thickness, flow class and set time must be matched to the correct grade (50/60/70/100) by an engineer against the current dated TDS, not assumed from the family name
• Being cementitious, it demands a properly prepared, saturated-surface-dry substrate and sealed, confined shuttering; poor surface prep is the single most common cause of precision-grout failure on Indian sites, and Emcekrete is not immune to it
• A high-flow pour has to be continuous — any mid-pour interruption risks a cold joint directly under the loaded baseplate
• The faster grades work against the clock in Delhi NCR summer heat, so batching, transfer and placement time need to be planned tightly rather than assumed from the pack instructions
• Not the right choice where an epoxy grout’s chemical resistance or very rapid strength gain under running load is the deciding factor — that is a different product category, not a weaker version of this one
• Pack sizes, exact gauging water and coverage should always be confirmed against the current dated TDS/COA at the time of order, since formulations and packaging do get revised

Selection & best practice

Specifications

Industry use cases

How we position MC-Bauchemie Emcekrete

Within MC-Bauchemie’s own range, Emcekrete sits alongside the Emcorepair concrete-repair mortars and the structural-strengthening systems that Space Arc also supplies — on a single site it’s common to use an Emcorepair mortar to reinstate a spalled foundation edge and then Emcekrete to re-grout the machine base sitting on it, keeping the whole repair on one manufacturer’s chemistry and one warranty. Against the wider market, the genuine alternative worth naming is Fosroc’s Conbextra GP2, a chloride-free, non-shrink cementitious precision grout covering similar general-purpose baseplate and machinery-grouting work; a specifier already standardised on Fosroc systems, or working to a spec that names Conbextra by number, might reasonably choose it over Emcekrete for that reason alone rather than any real gap in performance.

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