Experimental Behaviour of Water Hyacinth Ash As The Partial Replacement of Cement In Concrete

Abstract

Concrete is probably the most extensively used construction material in the world. The main ingredient in the conventional concrete is Portland cement. The amount of cement production emits approximately equal amount of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Cement production is consuming significant amount of natural resources. That has bought pressure to reduce cement consumption by the use of supplementary materials. Water hyacinth (Eichhornia crassipes), an entirely free source of biomass is found unutilized as supplementary cementitious material until now. It grows vigorously and richly to produce a large biomass and doubles the population in two weeks. In this work, studies have been carried out to evaluate this bio-waste for the first time as cementitious material and this will be beneficial for future application of Water hyacinth ash in cement concrete. The study focuses on the workability, compression strength and split tensile strength performance of the blended concrete containing different percentage of water hyacinth ash as a partial replacement of cement. The cement in concrete is replaced accordingly with the percentage of 10% and 20% by weight. Concrete cubes are testing at the age of 7 days of curing. Finally, the workability and strength performance of ash blended concrete is compared with conventional concrete. From the experimental investigation, it has been observed that, the optimum replacement of Water hyacinth ash to cement is 10% for M30 grade concrete.