Investigation of the Quality Control of Waste Products for Concrete

Abstract

This work uses testing for the quality of waste products in the production of concrete. This work will look at two different waste products. The first is Pulp Cure, a recently developed method for wet curing concrete. The other material is the usage of fly ash, a waste product from the coal power plant industry in higher volumes than is typically used in modern construction. A range of test methods were used on these materials. Some tests were novel and were developed and refined for this work and others were established ASTM methods. The test methods for Pulp Cure were developed and tested in the laboratory that could determine the quality of a Pulp Cure mixture through numerical data and visual observations. The performance of high volume fly ash, both class C and class F (ASTM C618), concrete was tested using ASTM methods for slump, strength, resistivity, and isothermal calorimetry. Comparisons were made to the bulk chemistry and particle size distribution of the fly ash in order to find correlations between oxide content and performance in order to promote the understanding of this material.