Abstract
In an attempt to create environmental friendly concrete, an investigation was carried out on the effects of adding non-biodegradable plastic fibers obtained from shredded waste polythene terephthalate bags on fresh and hardened properties of concrete. A pre-defined concrete mix was adopted with water to cement ratio of 0.45. Apart from control specimen, various concrete mixtures were produced by adding 0.5% to 1.5% waste polythene fibers by weight of cement while keeping all other fractions same. The novelty of this project, as per author’s knowledge, is in the size of fibers which was kept 2cm × 3cm. Larger size was selected as smaller polythene fibers would break very easily. Various tests performed on fresh and hardened concrete show that addition of plastic fibers change fresh-state, physical and mechanical properties of concrete. Experimental results revealed that the addition of plastics fibers causes increase in the workability of fresh concrete. However, the addition of these fibers reduces the density of hardened concrete and an increase the porosity and water absorption. Furthermore, on addition of these fibers reduction in the mechanical properties of concrete was observed too. Addition of 1.5% fibers caused a reduction of 9.7%, 6.9% and 12.4% in split tensile strength, compressive strength and flexural strength of concrete respectively. Based on the experimental results it might be argued that the various strength related parameters decrease on addition of fibers but the reduction may be considered small as compared to the environmental friendly nature of this material.
Keyword(s)
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