Behaviour of Carbon and Basalt Fibres Reinforced Fly Ash Geopolymer at Elevated Temperatures

Abstract

This paper presents the behaviour of potassium activators synthesized fly ash geopolymer containing carbon and basalt fibre at ambient and elevated temperature. Six series of fly ash based geopolymer were cast where carbon and basalt fibre were added as 0.5, 1 and 1.5% by weight of fly ash. One extra control series without any fibre was also cast. Each series of samples were tested at ambient temperature and also heated at 200, 400, 600 and 800 °C and thus a total of 35 series of samples were tested in this study. The result shows that the geopolymer containing 1 wt% basalt and 1 wt% carbon fibre exhibited better compressive strength, lower volumetric shrinkage and mass loss than other fibre contents. Among two fibres composites, the carbon fibre geopolymer exhibited better performance than its basalt fibre counterpart regardless of temperature. The microstructure of carbon fibre reinforced geopolymer composite is more compact containing fewer pores/voids than its basalt based counterpart at elevated temperatures. The results also support the fact that carbon fibre is better than basalt fibre at elevated temperature and showed better bonding with geopolymer at elevated temperature.