Research Article Design and Assessment of a Lightweight Polymer Concrete Utility Manhole Luciano Leonardi, 1 Teresa M. Pique , 1,2 Tomas Leizerow, 2 Humberto Balzamo, 2 Celina Bernal, 1,2 Anal´ ıa Vazquez, 1,2 and Eliana Agaliotis 1 1 Universidad de Buenos Aires, Facultad de Ingenier´ ıa, Buenos Aires, Argentina 2 Instituto de Tecnolog´ ıa de Pol´ ımeros y Nanotecnolog´ ıa (ITPN), Universidad de Buenos Aires/CONICET, Buenos Aires, Argentina Correspondence should be addressed to Teresa M. Pique; tpique@fi.uba.ar Received 23 May 2019; Revised 26 July 2019; Accepted 6 September 2019; Published 13 October 2019 Academic Editor: Zhonghua Yao Copyright © 2019 Luciano Leonardi et al. is is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Polymer concrete is a composite using polymer instead of portland cement as a binder. It allows optimizing the tensile and cracking strength and the chemical resistance of a concrete structure. In this study, different formulations were assessed in order to optimize a polymer concrete underground utility manhole with minimum weight. Formulations were based on an epoxy-amine system mixed with fine regular-weight aggregates and ultralightweight aggregates. e objective was to design and assess an underground utility structure with the epoxy chemical resistance, strength, and lightweight and to study whether the replacement of regular-weight aggregates by ultralightweight aggregates would contribute to improve the strength and reduce the structure weight. Two polymer concrete systems were designed from its formulation, and their mechanical performance was evaluated experimentally. A numerical model was developed for a polymer concrete underground utility structure made from the different formulations. It was simplified as a box subjected to typical soil loads. e size of the box is a standard one. Its minimum wall thickness is specified for sustaining the in-use service pressures obtained from numerical simulation. e model predicted that the epoxy/regular-weight aggregate formulation could be used with a wall thickness significantly smaller than the formulation with ultralightweight aggregates. In addition, the underground utility structure made with this formulation would weigh six times less than the same box made with a traditional portland cement concrete. 1. Introduction Polymer concrete is a composite material where the binder is a thermosetting polymer reinforced with aggregates. It was developed in 1970 responding to the need of a lightweight material with high compressive strength and good chemical resistance [1, 2]. Vibration damping is also another polymer concrete relevant property [3]. ere are several uses of precast polymer concrete such as drains, tanks, manholes [3], restoration building [4, 5], pavements [6], and underground utility structures [1], among others. e final properties of polymer concrete depend on its design and production conditions such as the type of binder, the mixing method, and the type and size distribution of the aggregates. e binder of polymer concrete is usually a thermosetting resin; hence, the viscosity and the gel time of the resin are also important preparation factors [7]. e thermosetting polymers used for polymer concrete are unsaturated polyester (UP), vinyl ester (VE), methyl methac- rylate (MMA), furan resin (FU), and epoxy resins [3]. e unsaturated polyester and vinyl ester are low-cost resins; however, the common use of styrene for their cross-linking makes them difficult to work with because of its high volatility. Other cross-linking agents were also used instead of styrene, but the glass transition temperature (T g ) decreased and the material exhibited inferior mechanical properties. For example, Mironi-Harpaz et al. [8] analyzed the use of peroxide as a cross- linking agent. However, the cross-linking reactions occurred together with scission events, and the polymer presented gel Hindawi Advances in Materials Science and Engineering Volume 2019, Article ID 5234719, 12 pages https://doi.org/10.1155/2019/5234719