material developed a dense structure and a good correlation was observed between mechanical strength and total porosity . The results reported in this paper are consistent with the observations of [20–22]; the bond between ribbed steel bars and concrete,together with both compressive and tensile strengths, increase with the increasing duration of the thermal curing in wet conditions.However, the increase in energy consumption needs to be considered and it may not be economic in practice. This is discussed in Section 3.5.