Alkali Activated Concrete using Industrial and Agro Waste-Mix proportioning and Experimental Investigation

The demand for concrete is increasing day by day due to vast development in urbanisation. One of the important ingredients to manufacture concrete is cement whose production is leading to large amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) releases attributing to global warming. To reduce the usage of cement in concrete, Supplementary Cementitious Materials (SCM) are given importance and plenty of research is done on them. SCM’s can replace cement upto permissible limits and enhance the concrete properties. The concretes that can replace the cement content completely are Geo Polymer Concrete (GPC) and Alkali Activated Concrete (AAC). They are eco-friendly concretes in which the wastes coming from various types of industries, treatment plants and agro wastes can be used as binders. Alkaline activator solution is used to activate the binder materials which is a combination of silicates and hydroxides. GPC and AAC has wide range of applications like making of concrete benches in park, balusters, paver blocks and non-load bearing components etc. In this paper, a novel mix design for AAC for a constant alkaline solution to binder ratio of 0.4 is presented. The molarity of sodium hydroxide used in this study is 10M. Various mix combinations of binders using Fly ash, Ground Granulated Blast Furnace Slag (GGBS) and Rice husk ash (RHA) were considered. Workability, Physical and mechanical properties of AAC mixes were determined including Non-Destructive tests (NDT). Mixes with RHA resulted in poor compressive strength as the water demand was high and curing under ambient conditions proved to be of low impact especially for AAC with RHA.