Towards potential applications of cement-polymer composites based on recycled polystyrene foam wastes on construction fields: Impact of exposure to water ecologies

Abstract

Cement-polymer composites were developed to enhance the mechanical durability and reduce the porosity of cement, and to acquire a value-added end product useful for many applications in the construction sector. The novel product should be stable during exposure to various challenging environments, e.g., water of different quality, origin, and dissolved ions. The present work evaluated the impact of immersing the new cement-polymer composites (CPs), containing different fractions of recycled waste polystyrene foam, in plain, ground and sea water on the composites’ properties. After 420 days of immersion in all studied types of water, the obtained CPs showed acceptable compressive strength values (more than 30 MPa); in addition, corrosion resistance coefficients (K) were increased more than unity in comparison to non-immersed samples. Moreover, this study also determined alterations of internal architecture of composite specimens cured for 28 days after immersion for up to 420 days in water of different composition. X-ray diffraction (XRD) and scanning electron microscopy (SEM) were used for these studies.

Keywords

• Cement
• Polystyrene
• Composites
• Immersion
• Waste recycling