STRENGTH AND DURABILITY CHARACTERISTICS OF CONCRETE PRODUCED WITH BOTTLE CORK AS COARSE AGGREGATE

Abstract

The high cost of conventional building materials such as coarse aggregate in developing countries like Nigeria has led to a lots of researches in the area of how locally available industrial and Agricultural waste can be adopted as partial or full replacement of coarse aggregate in concrete production. However, only strength of concrete was considered in concrete mix design procedure assuming that strength of concrete was an over all pervading factor for all other desirable properties of concrete including durability. Therefore, this paper investigates the thermal resistivity of concrete produced with Bottle Cork (BC) as coarse aggregate. This was achieved by producing concrete cubes by fully replaced Crush Granite (CG) with BC through absolute volume method of mix design having a mix ratio 1:2:4 (cement: sand: BC (coarse aggregate for the control)). Water/cement ratio of 0.6 was adopted for the research. Eighteen (18) concrete cubes were produced for BC specimen and 18 for the control. The specimens produced were heated at temperature of 300oC for 40 minutes after curing in water for 28 days and then quenching in water for 5 minutes (1st cycle). The cycle was repeated until cracks or damage was observed on the specimens. The same procedure was also repeated for varying temperatures of 600 and 900oC. The result shows that replacing CG with BC in concrete production could lead to reduction in thermal shocks resistance of the concrete by 3 cycles. The research therefore, recommends BC as alternative material to CG in production of concrete but the concrete should not be exposed to elevated temperature up to 900oC.