Utilisation of Oil Palm Fibre Biomass Waste as Additives in Foamed Concrete

Abstract

Worldwide, the construction industry has acknowledged the future demand for lightweight construction materials, with high workability, self-compacting, and environmentally friendly. Given this demand, recent innovative material namely foamed concrete (FC), has been found to reduce normal concrete’s weight potentially. However, while FC made with Ordinary Portland Cement has good compressive strength, other characteristics such as tension are relatively weak given the number of micro-cracks. Therefore, the study focused on the potential use of oil palm fibres in FC regarding their durability and mechanical properties. Notably, one of the major issues faced in the construction of reinforced FC is the corrosion of reinforcing steel which affects the behaviour and durability of concrete structures. Hence, in this study, oil palm fibres were added to improve strength and effectively reduce corrosion. Five types of fibre generated from oil palm waste were considered: oil palm trunk, oil palm frond, oil palm mesocarp and empty fruit bunch consisting of the stalk and spikelets. Specimens with a density of 1800 kg/m3 were prepared in which the weight fraction of the fibre content was kept constant at 0.45% for each mixture. Testing ages differed in testing and evaluating the parameters such as compressive strength, flexural strength, tensile strength, porosity, water absorption, drying shrinkage and ultrasonic pulse velocity. The results showed that the incorporation of oil palm fibre in FC helped reduce water absorption, porosity and shrinkage while enhancing the compressive, flexural and tensile strength of FC.