Behavior of High Performance Concrete by Using waste plastic as Aggregate

Abstract

Today sustainability has got top priority in construction industry. Concrete is one of the main building materials used in current construction activities around the world; therefore, many issues pertaining to concrete long term sustainability arise . High consumption of natural sources, high amount production of industrial wastes and environmental pollution require obtaining new solutions for a sustainable development . Moreover , the growth of the world plastic industry has been tremendous. Among plastic, the most familiar user plastics used is Polyethylene Terephthalate (PET) . It is obtained in massive quantity from bottles most commonly used for packaging of beverages and drinking water. This work aims to study the possibility of using waste plastic (Polyethylene Terephthalate (PET) , got by shredded PET bottles ) as fine aggregate , which substituted part of natural sand in the manufacturing of the High Performance concrete (HPC). For this purpose , an experimental study was carried out to evaluate physical and mechanical properties and also the durability of the HPC that contained plastic wastes and were compared with reference concrete without plastic aggregate . The natural sand is substituted with the PET-aggregate at dosages (0%, 2.5%, 5%, and 7.5% by volume of the sand) to produce High Performance Concrete mixes , in addition , using superplasticizer (SP) , and 10% silica fume (SF) , as a partial replacement by weight of cement. The physical (bulk density, porosity, water absorption and ultrasonic pulse velocity testing ) and mechanical (compressive , splitting tensile , flexural strength and static modulus of elasticity ) properties of HPC were evaluated. In addition, the freezing - thawing resistance was measured to determined durability factor of HPC with and without PET-aggregate .