• Advances in concrete construction
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• 제2권1호
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• pp.29-37
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• 2014

Increasing emphasis on energy conservation and environmental protection has led to the investigation of the alternatives to customary building materials. Some of the significant goals behind understaking such investigations are to reduce the greenhouse gasemissions and minimize the energy required formaterial production.The usage of concrete around the world is second only to water. Ordinary Portland Cement (OPC) is conventionally used as the primary binder to produce concrete. The cement production is a significant industrial activity in terms of its volume and contribution to greenhouse gas emission. Globally, the production of cement contributes at least 5 to 7 % of $CO_2$. Another major problem of the environment is to dispose off the fly ash, a hazardous waste material, which is produced by thermal power plant by combustion of coal in power generation processes. The geopolymer concrete aims at utilizing the maximum amount of fly ash and reduce $CO_2$ emission in atmosphere by avoiding use of cement to making concrete. This paper reports an experimental work conducted to investigate the effect of curing conditions on the compressive strength of geopolymer concrete prepared by using fly ash as base material and combination of sodium hydroxide and sodium silicate as alkaline activator.

• Advances in concrete construction
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• 제14권5호
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• pp.331-339
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• 2022

Geopolymer concrete (GPC) is one of the best substitute materials for conventional concrete in construction. The conventional concrete provided by Portland cement has a detrimental influence on the environment during its production. In this study, the bond strength, which is an important structural property, of deformed steel bars with slag-based GPC was measured. In accordance with the ASTM C234 procedure, bond strength was measured on 18 specimens of slag-based GPC with three sizes of steel bars and different embedded lengths. Two groups of GPC specimens with different compressive strengths, which were cured under ambient conditions, were tested. The results indicated that the bar diameter has a great effect on the bond strength, and the bond strength behavior of the slag-based GPC is comparable with that of conventional concrete. The ACI-318 Code for the bond strength of ordinary Portland cement concrete can be used conservatively to determine the bond strength of the GPC reinforced with deformed steel bars.

• Steel and Composite Structures
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• 제51권5호
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• pp.529-543
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• 2024

The bonding efficacy of steel I-section embedded in metakaolin-fly ash-based geopolymer concrete (MK-FA-GC) was investigated in this study. Push-out tests were conducted on nine column specimens to evaluate the influence of compressive strength of concrete, embedded length of steel I-section, thickness of concrete cover, and stirrup ratio on the bond performance. Failure patterns, load-slip relationships, bond strength, and distribution of bond stress among the specimens were analyzed. The characteristic bond strength of geopolymer concrete (GC) increased with higher compressive strength, longer embedded steel section length, thicker concrete cover, and larger stirrup ratio. Empirical formulas for bond strength at the loading end were derived based on experimental data and a bond-slip constructive model for steel-reinforced MK-FA-GC was proposed. The calculated bond-slip curves showed good agreement with experimental results. Furthermore, numerical simulations using ABAQUS software were performed on column specimens by incorporating the suggested bond-slip relationship into connector elements to simulate the interface behavior between MK-FA-GC and the steel section. The simulation results showed a good correlation with the experimental findings.

• Advances in nano research
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• 제4권3호
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• pp.181-195
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• 2016

Addition of nano-$SiO_2$ (NS) to geopolymer composites has been studied through measurement of compressive strengths, FTIR and XRD analysis. Alumino-silicate materials are coarse aggregate included waste concrete and demolished walls with its cementing binder, cement kiln dust (CKD) used and can possess a pronouncing activation for the geopolymer reaction resulting from the high alkali contents within. Materials prepared at water/binder ratios in a range of 0.30: 0.40 under curing of $40^{\circ}C$ and 100% Relative Humidity (R.H.), while the used activator is sodium hydroxide in the ratio of 2 wt. %. First, CKD is added in the ratio from 10 up to 50 wt., %, and the demolished walls was varied depending on the used CKD content, while using constant ratio of waste concrete (40 wt., %). Second step, depending on the optimum CKD ratio resulted from the first one (40 wt. %), so the control geopolymer mix composed of cement kiln dust, demolished walls and waste concrete in the ratio (40:20:40, wt %). Nano-silica partially replaced waste concrete by 1 up to 8%. Results indicated that, compressive strengths of geopolymer mixes incorporating nano-silica were obviously higher than those control one, especially at early ages and specially with 3%NS.

• International Journal of Concrete Structures and Materials
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• 제9권2호
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• pp.145-158
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• 2015

The consequence of sulfate attack on geopolymer concrete, made from an alkali activated natural pozzolan (AANP) has been studied in this paper. Changes in the compressive strength, expansion and capillary water absorption of specimens have been investigated combined with phases determination by means of X-ray diffraction. At the end of present investigation which was to evaluate the performance of natural alumina silica based geopolymer concrete in sodium and magnesium sulfate solution, the loss of compressive strength and percentage of expansion of AANP concrete was recorded up to 19.4 % and 0.074, respectively.

• Advances in concrete construction
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• 제5권2호
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• pp.145-154
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• 2017

In the present day scenario, concrete construction is rapidly becoming uneconomical and non sustainable practice, due to the scarcity of raw materials and environmental pollution caused by the manufacturing of cement. In this study an attempt has been made to propose recycled aggregates from demolition wastes as coarse aggregate in geopolymer concrete (GPC). Experimental investigations have been conducted to find optimum percentage of recycled aggregates (RA) in GPC by replacing 20%, 30%, 40%, 50% and 60% of coarse aggregates by RA to produce recycled aggregate geopolymer concrete (RGPC). From the study it has been found that the optimum replacement percentage of recycled aggregates was 40% based on mechanical properties and workability. In order to study and compare the flexural behaviour of RGPC and GPC four beams of size $175mm{\times}150mm{\times}1200mm$ were prepared and tested under two point loading. Test results were evaluated with respect to first crack load, ultimate load, load-deflection characteristics, ductility and energy absorption characteristics. Form the experimental study it can be concluded that the addition of recycled aggregate in GPC causes slight reduction in its strength and ductility. Since the percentage reduction in strength and behaviour of RGPC is meager compared to GPC it can be recommended as a sustainable and environment friendly construction material.

• Computers and Concrete
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• 제33권2호
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• pp.137-145
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• 2024

The technique of experimentally determining concrete's compressive strength for a given mix design is time-consuming and difficult. The goal of the current work is to propose a best working predictive model based on different machine learning algorithms such as Gradient Boosting Machine (GBM), Stacked Ensemble (SE), Distributed Random Forest (DRF), Extremely Randomized Trees (XRT), Generalized Linear Model (GLM), and Deep Learning (DL) that can forecast the compressive strength of ternary geopolymer concrete mix without carrying out any experimental procedure. A geopolymer mix uses supplementary cementitious materials obtained as industrial by-products instead of cement. The input variables used for assessing the best machine learning algorithm not only include individual ingredient quantities, but molarity of the alkali activator and age of testing as well. Myriad statistical parameters used to measure the effectiveness of the models in forecasting the compressive strength of ternary geopolymer concrete mix, it has been found that GBM performs better than all other algorithms. A sensitivity analysis carried out towards the end of the study suggests that GBM model predicts results close to the experimental conditions with an accuracy between 95.6 % to 98.2 % for testing and training datasets.

• Computers and Concrete
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• 제20권4호
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• pp.381-389
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• 2017

The various types of structural materials that are available in the construction industry nowadays make it necessary to predict their stress-strain behavior. Geopolymer are alternatives for ordinary Portland cement concrete that are made from pozzolans activation. Due to relatively new material, many mechanical specifications of geopolymer are still not yet discovered. In this study, stress-strain behavior has been provided from experiments for unconfined geopolymers. Modulus of Elasticity and stress-strain behavior are critical requirements at analysis process and knowing complete stress-strain curve facilitates structural behavior assessment at nonlinear analysis for structures that have built with geopolymers. This study intends to investigate stress-strain behavior and modulus of elasticity from experimental data that belongs for geopolymers varying in fineness and mix design and curing method. For the sake of behavior determination, 54 types of geopolymer are used. Similar mix proportions are used for samples productions that have different fineness and curing approach. The results indicated that the compressive strength ranges between 7.7 MPa and 43.9 MPa at the age of 28 days curing.

• Computers and Concrete
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• 제34권2호
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• pp.213-230
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• 2024

The use of waste tires and industrial wastes such as fly ash (FA) and ground granulated blast furnace slag (GGBS) in concrete is an important issue in terms of sustainability. In this study, the effect of parameters affecting the physical, mechanical and microstructural properties of FA/GGBS-based geopolymer concretes with waste rubber fiber was investigated. For this purpose, the effects of rubber fiber percentage (0.6%, 0.9%, 1.2%), binder (75FA25GGBS, 50FA50GGBS, 25FA75GGBS) and curing temperature (75 ℃, 90 ℃ and 105 ℃) were investigated. The Taguchi-Grey Relational Analysis (TGRA) method was used to obtain optimum parameter levels of rubber fiber geopolymer concrete (RFGC). The slump, fresh and hardened density, compressive strength, flexural strength, static and dynamic modulus of elasticity, ultrasonic pulse velocity (UPV) tests and scanning electron microscopy (SEM) analysis were performed on the produced concretes. The analysis of variance (ANOVA) method was used to statistically determine the effects of the parameters on the experimental results. A confirmation test was performed to test the accuracy of the optimum values found by the TGRA method. With the increase of GGBS percentage, the compressive strength of RFGC increased up to 196%. The increase in rubber fiber percentage and curing temperature adversely affected the mechanical properties of RFGC. As a result of TGRA, the optimum value was found to be A1B3C1. ANOVA results showed that the most effective parameter on the experimental results was the binder with 99% contribution percentage. It is understood from the SEM images that the optimum concrete had a denser microstructure and less capillary cracks and voids. For this study, the use of the TGRA method in multiple optimization has proven to provide very useful and reliable results. In cases where many factors are effective on its strength and durability, such as geopolymer concrete, using the TGRA method allows for finding the optimum value of the parameters by saving both time and cost.

• Computers and Concrete
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• 제31권4호
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• pp.327-335
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• 2023

The most popular building material, concrete, is intrinsically linked to the advancement of humanity. Due to the ever-increasing complexity of cementitious systems, concrete formulation for desired qualities remains a difficult undertaking despite conceptual and methodological advancement in the field of concrete science. Recognising the significant pollution caused by the traditional cement industry, construction of civil engineering structures has been carried out successfully using Geopolymer Concrete (GPC), also known as High Performance Concrete (HPC). These are concretes formed by the reaction of inorganic materials with a high content of Silicon and Aluminium (Pozzolans) with alkalis to achieve cementitious properties. These supplementary cementitious materials include Ground Granulated Blast Furnace Slag (GGBFS), a waste material generated in the steel manufacturing industry; Fly Ash, which is a fine waste product produced by coal-fired power stations and Silica Fume, a by-product of producing silicon metal or ferrosilicon alloys. This result demonstrated that GPC/HPC can be utilised as a substitute for traditional Portland cement-based concrete, resulting in improvements in concrete properties in addition to environmental and economic benefits. This study explores utilising experimental data to train artificial neural networks, which are then used to determine the effect of supplementary cementitious material replacement, namely fly ash, Ground Granulated Blast Furnace Slag (GGBFS) and silica fume, on the compressive strength, tensile strength, and modulus of elasticity of concrete and to predict these values accordingly.