Strength evaluation of concrete with fly ash and GGBFS as cement replacing materials

Concrete is the most widely used material of construction. Concrete gained the popularity as a construction material due to the easy availability of its component materials, the easy formability, strength and rigidity upon setting and curing.In construction industry, strength is the primary criterion in selecting a concrete for a particular application. Now a days, the substantial amount of waste materials, containing the properties of the Pozzolana, is being generated from the major industries; and disposal of such industrial wastes generated in abundance is also a serious problem from the environmental and pollution point of view. On this backdrop, efforts are made by the researchers for exploring the possible utilization of such waste materials in making the sustainable construction material. The present paper reports the experimental investigations to study the strength characterization of concrete made from the pozzolanic waste materials. For this purpose, the Pozzolanic materials such as fly ash and ground granulated blast furnace slag were used as a cement replacing materials in conjunction with ordinary Portland cement. Equal amount of these materials were used in eight trial mixes with varying amount of cement. The water cement ratio was also varied. The chemical admixture was also added to improve the workability of concrete. The compressive strengths for 7, 28, 40 and 90 days' were evaluated whereas the flexural and tensile strengths corresponding to 7, 28 and 40 days were evaluated. The study corroborates that the pozzolanic materials used in the present investigation along with the cement can render the sustainable concrete.