Hardened properties of self-compacting concretes prepared with recycled aggregates

The recycled aggregate (RA), self-compacting concrete(SCC) and supplementary cementing materials (SCM) are important for solving the environmental problem related to construction industry. Thus the main objective of this thesis is to investigate the hardened properties of the SCC prepared with recycled coarse aggregates (RCAs) and recycled fine aggregates (RFAs). The hardened properties of self-compacting concretes (SCC) prepared with recycled aggregate is a new research area on which a very limited scientific research has been carried out in the current literature. Natural coarse aggregates (NCAs) and natural fine aggregates (NFAs) of conventional SCC were substituted by RCAs and RFAs at volume fractions of 0% to 100%. Totally, sixteen SCC mixtures were produced and classified into four series; each series included four mixes designed with water to a binder ratio (w/b) of 0.3 and 0.43, respectively. Moreover, silica fume (SF) as a 10% replacement level is also utilized to compare the performance of SCC with and without SF. Hardened properties of SCC were tested for compressive strength, water sorptivity, water permeability, chloride ion permeability, gas permeability, drying shrinkage and restrained shrinkage at 56 days.The results reveal that incorporating RCAs and/or RFAs resulted in a decrease in performance for SCCs due to the high permeable and porous structure. Moreover, durability of SCC made with RAs was generally improved by SF, irrespective of the size of RAs and w/b ratios.