Journal of Engineering Science and Technology (Mar 2010)
ABSORPTION AND PERMEABILITY PERFORMANCE OF SELANGOR RICE HUSK ASH BLENDED GRADE 30 CONCRETE
Abstract
Substituting waste materials in construction is well known for conservation of dwindling resources and preventing environmental and ecological damages caused by quarrying and depletion of raw materials. Many researches had shown that some of these wastes have good pozzolanic properties that would improve the quality of concrete produced. One such waste material is agricultural waste rice husk, which constitute about one-fifth of 600 million tonnes of rice produced annually in the world. The RHA obtained by burning the rice husk in the ferrocement furnace and used as a cement replacement material. The use of this supplementary cementing material is expected to meet the increase in demand of cement, as the current world cement production of approximately 1.2 million tonnes is expected to grow exponentially to about 3.5 billions tonnes per year by 2015. This paper reports the results of durability performance conducted on the normal strength concrete specimens of 30 N/mm2 containing 20% or 30% RHA by cement weight, with or without addition of superplasticizer. The results show that replacement of cement with RHA lowers initial surface absorption, lowers the permeability, lowers the absorption characteristics, longer time taken for the capillary suction resulted in lower sorptivity value, lower water permeability and increase the resistance of concrete to chloride ion penetration in comparison with the OPC control concrete. The present investigations revealed that incorporation RHA significantly improve the absorption and permeability characteristics of concrete.
