Mechanical and Durability Studies of Ambient Cured Alkali Activated Concrete with Various Source Materials

Abstract

Sustainability is the need of the hour. Developing countries have huge demand for power, which principally comes from coal. Also with fast economic growth there is tremendous amount of generation of industrial waste, which when not disposed of correctly leads to pollution of air, water and land. Concrete is the second largest used building material,and has a huge potential to utilise these industrial wastes. With advancement in different types of concrete and there is greater use of cement. It is observed that production of cement creates lot of pollution and has negative impact on environment. It is an inevitable need to have an alternative binder to cement without compromising on the mechanical properties of durability properties of OPCC. Alkali-activated binders can be considered as recent development in concrete tech-nology. This concrete is produced by binding any source material rich in silica and alumina that will react with alkaline activators to produce a long chain poly-mers.India is a developing nation and hence needs to utilise its resources in a ju-dicious manner. The main objective of the present work was to find a sustainable alternative to cement as binding material in concrete. In present investigation, lo-cally available industrial waste such as fly ash, bottom ash and ground granulated blast furnace slag including a combination of these materials were used to produce M25 grade of concrete. Literature review showed that the majority of studies, were done using either heat or steam curing to achieve desired mechanical properties. However, heat treatment is costly and not a viable option for alkali-activated con-crete in field application. Therefore, it was decided to opt for the ambient curing for casting various concrete mixtures.