Efficient and Beneficial Use of Industrial By-Products in Concrete Technology

Nearly 4.2 billion tons of non-hazardous by-products are generated from agricultural, domestic, industrial, and mineral sources and have been used in land filling, due to nonavailability of economically attractive use options. Coal combustion produces minute particles of fly ash that cause huge environmental damage. Land filling is undesirable because it causes, not only huge financial burdens to producers of by-producers, but makes them responsible for unknown future environmental liabilities. To address this problem, concrete researchers initiated studies to see whether these by-products could be used in concrete, as a result of these studies, many by-products were found to be efficient in concrete, thus finding cost-effective solutions to waste disposal problems. In this study an extensive experimental program was carried out to study the concrete properties with and without pozzolanic material such as fly ash, silica fume, and slag for three types of concrete mixtures. In this paper, permeability is considered as the main measuring parameter for producing durable concrete. As a result, it was found that producing durable concrete with low diffusivity and permeability without the addition of pozzolanic material is impossible.