Experimental Characterization of Recycled Aggregate Concrete

Abstract

The field of construction is evolving rapidly over the last decade. This is justified by the evolution of human activity in various fields mainly tourism, industry … and the aging of several buildings which implies a renovation or a demolition/re-construction. These construction activities involve a large need for aggregates for new construction and a large tonnage of waste from demolitions. In order to remedy this, various stakeholders in the field (suppliers, cement works, research centers, etc.) have valued recycled aggregate concrete (RAC). Recycled aggregates concrete is considered a new type of concrete based on the use of aggregates retrieved from the demolished structures instead of natural aggregates. This replacement affects, for sure, the characteristics of the concrete produced specially the mechanical properties. Developed countries have made a great progress in normalizing the use of recycled aggregates (RA) in concrete implementation as a result of many studies done since 80’s. In Morocco, recycled aggregates do not have any specific standards, and is used mainly in roads and pavements construction. Even if it’s not normalized this use is not recent, in 1999 during the rehabilitation of the expressway road of Casablanca which was severely damaged on both channels, the authorities have opted for the reuse of aggregates instead of reloading the existing pavement with a new one. The study is based on the use of recycled concrete crushed from an old building in Rabat- Morocco as aggregates and compared it with naturel aggregates from Morocco to determinate the effect of this replacement on several characteristics of concrete. This article is aiming to investigate experimentally the effect of RA in concrete using different replacement levels, different types of adjuvant and different percentages of it. The results show that over 30% of replacement, the compressive strength decreases considerably for basic concrete. In order to increase the compressive strength for the RAC with a percentage of replacement over 50%, we used different types of additives (Plasticizer, superplasticizer and new generation superplasticizer) and different percentage of it (0.5%, 1% and 1.5%): We concludes that, for our case, the add of plasticizer gives the best result and that the 1% replacement is the optimum percentage. The tests done on RCA made by plasticizer with different replacement level confirm the results without plasticizer: Compressive strength decreases when the replacement percentage increases.