A Study on Strength Of Concrete Using Rubber Fiber and Granite Waste

Mohit Jhakar, Ms. Shweta chouhan

granite cutting w,aste, Rubber Fiber.

In the present world of urbanization and industrialization, concrete is an important structural material. It is a heterogeneous mixture of cement or lime as a binding material, fine aggregate, coarse aggregate, water and admixture. For fine aggregates, natural river sand is commonly used and due to the restriction on the extraction and scarcity of natural resources, construction cost comes out to be very high. On one side, excess depletion of natural river sand shows very clear environmental impacts like exploitation of natural water bodies, damage to the vegetations and fisheries, etc., on the other side, various industries face problems in safe disposal and handling of the wastes generated by them due to its excessive accumulation. For example, mining industries of granite stones produce tons of non-biodegradable fine powder waste and various rubber processing units produce rubber wastes, which is quite difficult to handle and involves various tedious disposal procedures that are quite harmful to the environment. If these wastes possess suitable properties, they can be used as an addition or replacement of one or more components of concrete. The utilization of these hazardous wastes in concrete manufacturing not only reduces the cost of construction but also would result in a green environment and viable concrete technology.

The main aim of this work is to experimentally investigate the possibility of using granite cutting waste (GCW) and rubber fiber as a partial substitution of sand in concrete. Fibers obtained from mechanical grinding of used rubber tire have been incorporated in this research work. The percentage of rubber fiber in all concrete mixes is kept fixed which is 10%  by weight of fine aggregates while the remaining fine aggregates have been replaced by granite cutting waste (GCW) with the percentages 0%, 10%, 20%, 30% & 40%. It was observed that the substitution of 20% natural sand with granite cutting waste & 10% sand by rubber fiber appeared to be most effective in increasing the compressive, flexural strength, impact resistance, improved abrasion resistance and resistance to water permeability and water absorption as compared to other ratios.