Fresh properties of self-compacting concretes containing waste coarse rubber aggregates

When the plastic materials used in daily life complete their lifetime or lost their necessary, they are continuously added to the waste materials in the landfills all over the world and their disposal needs a viable and environmental friendly solution. Recycled plastic materials is a promising material in the construction industry due to its light weight, elasticity, energy absorption, sound and heat insulating properties. Recycled plastic materials, which are produced form waste plastic materials and used for raw material in industry, have been used in this study to replace the coarse aggregate by weight using different percentages. The paper presented herein was carried out to investigate the workability and rheological properties of self-compacting concretes rubberized concretes with fly ash, with and without silica fume. At a water/binder (w/b) ratio of 0.32, the self-compacting concretes (SCC) were produced by replacing the coarse aggregate with four designated waste rubber contents of 0%, 10%, 20%, 30% and 40% by coarse aggregate volume. Moreover, the SCC with silica fume was produced in second series of mixes by partial substitution of cement with silica fume at varying amounts of 10% and this addition was examined with the relationship of the rubber content. Totally, 10 concrete mixtures were produced and tested for workability related properties such as passing ability, filling ability and rheology. The measured properties of concrete fresh behavior were concrete flow and passing-ability by slump flow, L-box and V-funnel tests. For the rheological testing of fresh SCCs, ICAR rheometer was used to find the rheological parameters. Key words: waste rubber, rheology, self–compacting concrete, silica fume, workability.