Effect of rice husk ash and fly ash on the compressive strength of high performance concrete

Abstract

The usage of industrial and agricultural wastes for building materials production plays an important role to improve the environment and economy by preserving nature materials and land resources, reducing land, water and air pollution as well as organizing and storing waste costs. This study mainly focuses on mathematical modeling dependence of the compressive strength of high performance concrete (HPC) at the ages of 3, 7 and 28 days on the amount of rice husk ash (RHA) and fly ash (FA), which are added to the concrete mixtures by using the Central composite rotatable design. The result of this study provides the second-order regression equation of objective function, the images of the surface expression and the corresponding contours of the objective function of the regression equation, as the optimal points of HPC compressive strength. These objective functions, which are the compressive strength values of HPC at the ages of 3, 7 and 28 days, depend on two input variables as: x1 (amount of RHA) and x2 (amount of FA). The Maple 13 program, solving the second-order regression equation, determines the optimum composition of the concrete mixture for obtaining high performance concrete and calculates the maximum value of the HPC compressive strength at the ages of 28 days. The results containMaxR28HPC = 76.716 MPa when RHA = 0.1251 and FA = 0.3119 by mass of Portland cement.