Experimental Study of Foam Concrete by Using Different Mixes

Abstract

Abstract: Foamed concrete can also be termed as lightweight or cellular concrete. It consist of is a cementitious paste, fines, water and has coarse aggregate without voids. Voids are created by using foam. It creates more strength than plain foam concrete (PFC) by using admixtures like fly ash, silica and fibers in it . Under this research program, three different mixes were made: plain foamed concrete (PFC), polypropylene fiber reinforced foamed concrete (PPFC) and basalt fiber reinforced foamed concrete (BFC). Specimens were tested for compressive strength, splitting tensile strength, young’s modulus and poisson’s ratio, flexural strength and RFC (Reinforced foamed concrete) strength. This study showed that the use of optimum foam volume i.e. 20% gives a specific density of foam concrete 70 – 100 PFC and compressive strength of 3000 – 5500 psi. As the study of flexural and compression application eight different steel reinforced sandwich beams, sixteen compression column of witch eight are tested with and without reinforcement separately respectively. These sandwich beams of steel reinforcement were divided in four different sets as two of each, normal concrete - Styrofoam R-13 rating combination, normal concrete - PFC combination, normal concrete - PPFC combination and normal concrete – BFC combination. Likewise, for study of structural behavior of compression column the specimens were divided same as sandwich beams into different groups. The flexural strength of BFC specimen was 10 times more than PFC specimen. Among the RFC beam specimens, BFC has shown maximum load carrying capacity. Keywords: Foam concrete, light weight concrete, strength, PFC, BFC and PPFC