Recycled Chicken Feather Sand as a Partial Replacement for Natural Sand for Producing Eco-Friendly Mortar

Abstract

In this paper, initial experiments were carried out to determine the possibility of using chicken feathers instead of sand in mortar. After earlier research suggested that chicken feathers had a high durability and resilience to degradation, chicken feathers recovered from slaughterhouses were chosen due to the significant cross-linking and strong bonding within their structure. Compared to natural sand, chicken feather sand (CFS) works as an eco-friendly resource. In this study, the chicken feather content ranged from 5% to 25% of the total volume of fine aggregates. The findings confirmed that the compressive strengths of the specimens are inversely proportional to the amount of feathers added. The specimen with 10% CFS had a compressive strength of 57.8 MPa after 28 days of curing. As the weight of CFS in the mortar increased from 1.26% to 10% of the control mixture, the workability significantly decreased. After soaking in water for 24 h, materials with higher proportions of feathers had a noticeably decreased compressive and flexural strength as well as increased water absorption and swelling. For 80% of the CFS replacement, the results are good. Additional CFS replacement tends to reduce the mortar weight.