Behaviour of fibre reinforced coconut shell concrete

Abstract

In recent days, the notable contribution of using waste materials in place of conventional coarse aggregate in concrete has gained significant attention to make the concrete sustainable building materials. Coconut Shell (CS) is one such agricultural solid waste material found in many countries around the globe including India. In India, more than 23904 million coconut nuts have been produced in 2016 2017 which is about 30 % of world coconut production followed by Indonesia. The large production of coconut shell simultaneously increases agricultural waste. When coconut shell is used as an alternative coarse aggregate in concrete production, numerous advantages such as reducing the environmental burden as well as the cost of concrete production can be gained. Past researches on CS revealed that CS could be considered as a suitable alternate for crushed stone aggregates for the production of sustainable eco-friendly lightweight concrete known as coconut shell concrete. However, the utilization of CS concrete in reinforced cement concrete element is not practiced due to its week durability characteristics and low tensile strength. The replacement of a significant portion of cement by fly ash and the addition of fibre has been effective measures to solve durability and tensile strength issue respectively. The initial task is to find out the optimum replacement of cement by class F fly ash. The next task in developing CS fibre reinforced concrete is the selection of suitable fibres. In this research, fibrillated polypropylene (PP) fibres and steel fibres were used in the CS concrete to explore the effects of fibres on the mechanical characteristics of fibre reinforced CS concrete and thus to choose the appropriate fibre. This would facilitate to investigate the effect of fibres addition on the mechanical characteristics and flexural behaviours of CS concrete. newline