A contribution to the study of mortars prepared with recycled sand

Abstract

No one denies that today concrete is the most used material in the field of civil engineering. It is widely admitted that the production of concrete necessitates large quantities of fine aggregates, specifically river sand and crushed sand. Moreover, the excessive exploitation of river sand, which generally causes a multitude of environmental problems, has pushed the majority of governments around the world to issue rules for the purpose of limiting or preventing the illegal extraction of river sand. The present article aims primarily to make a contribution to studying the possibility of replacing natural sand (NS) and crushed sand (CS) with recycled sand (RS) in ternary mortars, at proportions ranging from 20% to 100%. The consistency of the mixtures, the densities in the fresh and hardened state, the compressive strength after 3, 14 and 28 days of hardening, as well as the absorption of water by immersion and by capillarity at 28 days, were determined and discussed. It should be noted that the (W/C) ratio was set at 0.7 for all mixtures. The experimental results showed that recycled sand could be successfully used as an alternative to natural sand, up to a rate of 40%, for the manufacture of ternary mortars without significantly affecting their properties.