Case Studies in Construction Materials (Dec 2022)
A worldwide development in the accumulation of waste tires and its utilization in concrete as a sustainable construction material: A review
Abstract
The worldwide enhancement in the accumulation of waste tires and associated upcoming environmental and social concerns are becoming the primary intimidations. Waste tires are considered an undervalued resource globally, and their sheer volume is used to be disposed of in landfills, a primary concern. Instead of disposing of waste materials after recycling, the utilization can have a considerable impact. The trend of extracting steel fibers from waste tires is emerging nowadays. Incorporating waste recycled tire steel (WRTS) fibers, obtained from waste tires in concrete is a potential profit-gaining engineering application. But there are still some challenges, like WRTS fibers' suitable volumetric content and length selection, which need to be addressed by having in-depth exploration. Research has been conducted on incorporating reused waste materials in cementitious composites. Concrete ingredients are meant to provide strength, but adding reused waste materials to concrete helps reduce environmental pollution and make it sustainable and economical. In previous literature, the impact of such waste fibers on the key properties of concrete, such as ultrasonic pulse velocity, compressive, splitting-tensile and flexural strengths, energy absorption, modulus of elasticity, toughness, and ductility, were investigated. Adding WRTS fibers to concrete can enhance its compressive strength by more than 10 % and flexural strength by more than 50 %. This paper aims to review the application of WRTS fiber-reinforced concrete to identify the research gap for researchers in this direction. The available research outcomes and the recycling process of WRTS fibers are summarized and discussed. It is concluded that incorporating WRTS fibers in concrete would result in sustainable development by providing economical and environment-friendly construction materials with improved mechanical properties.
