Effect of Internal Curing with Superabsorbent Polymers on the Compressive Strength and Shrinkage of Concrete with Natural Volcanic Ash
Publication: Journal of Materials in Civil Engineering
Volume 36, Issue 6
Abstract
The abundant natural volcanic ash (NVA) in East Africa is a prospective supplementary cementitious material that may be used to produce green and economical railway concrete. To mitigate the shrinkage of concrete with NVA, internal curing using a superabsorbent polymer (SAP) is employed in this study. The compressive strength, autogenous shrinkage, and drying shrinkage of internally cured concrete with NVA were measured. In addition, the water loss and internal relative humidity of internally cured concrete with NVA were analyzed. The results indicate that the compressive strength of concrete with NVA shows a linear decreasing trend with SAP. In addition, SAP significantly reduces the autogenous shrinkage but slightly increases the drying shrinkage of concrete with NVA. The internal curing using SAP increases the water loss of concrete, whereas the water released from SAP still significantly improves the internal relative humidity (IRH) of concrete. The positive influence of internal curing on the autogenous shrinkage overwhelms the unexpected influence on the drying shrinkage, resulting in the mitigated shrinkage of concrete with NVA.
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Data Availability Statement
Some or all data, models, or code that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.
Acknowledgments
The authors gratefully acknowledge the financial supports provided by National Natural Science Foundation of China (U22B2076, 51878480, and 52078369), National Key Research and Development Projects (2022YFC3803104), the MITT’s 2021 Public Service Platforms for Industrial Technology Foundation (2021-H029-1-1), Program of Shanghai Academic Research Leader (22XD1403300), China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (22M712396), Major Scientific and Technological Research Projects in Ningbo (2022Z030), the Opening Project of State Key Laboratory of Green Building Materials, and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities.
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Published In
Journal of Materials in Civil Engineering
Volume 36 • Issue 6 • June 2024
Copyright
© 2024 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Apr 23, 2023
Accepted: Oct 13, 2023
Published online: Mar 19, 2024
Published in print: Jun 1, 2024
Discussion open until: Aug 19, 2024
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