Partial Cement Replacement using Crusher Stone Dust

ABSTRACT

Crusher stone dust containing mainly of SiO2 does not show cementitious property in the presence of water. However, it can exhibit significant cementitious property when reacting with the byproduct of cement hydration at high temperature. This paper presents the results for hardened property of mortar (compressive strength) under normal, hot water curing and autoclaving curing condition for cement replacement using crusher stone dust. It is shown that up to 40% cement replacement by crusher stone dust and autoclave curing gave same or better compressive strength than the mortar without replacement and normal curing.
Keywords: Compressive strength; Mortar; Stone dust; Waste management

1.0 INTRODUCTION

It is estimated around twenty million houses must be built in India to overcome the housing shortage 1. Further, the infrastructure development, such as, major express highway projects and industrial development have started in recent times. Such major concrete construction activities have increased the demand of crushed stone aggregates to be used as coarse aggregate for production of concrete. This has lead to increasing quantity of stone dust from crushers as waste. The disposal of this dust is a serious environmental problem. If it is possible to use the crusher stone dust in production of concrete and mortar by partial replacement of cement, then this will not only reduce the cost of construction but at the same time it will solve the problem of disposal of crusher stone dust (CSD). Jaafar, et al 2 studied the effect of using fine stone dust as cement replacement on the mechanical properties as well as durability characteristics in high strength concrete. The authors found that high strength concrete having 30 % fine stone dust as cement replacement and autoclaved has similar or better mechanical properties and durability performance compared to high strength concrete using steam cured normal concrete.

There is a need to explore the effect of different curing methods on the strength characteristics for the replacement of cement by CSD. In the present paper, CSD having fineness similar to that of cement is used to replace the latter. The addition of this dust to cement will have significant effect when autoclaving is used for curing due to the presence of high quantity of silica. Autoclaving was first employed in the manufacturing of sand-lime bricks and lightweight cellular concrete. In the field of concrete and mortar, autoclaving is mainly applied to precast products. The main objective of this paper is to study the strength characteristics of mortar developed by replacing cement with crusher stone dust at 10 %, 20%, 30%, 40%, 50% and 60% when normal cured, hot water cured and autoclaving cured. 1.1 EXPERIMENTAL PROGRAMME ACC 33 grade equivalent slag cement was used for the investigation. The initial and final setting times were 122 min and 232 min, respectively. The 7 days and 28 days compressive strength were 22.51 MPa and 30.96 MPa, respectively. The tests on cement were carried out as per IS 4031 3. Le Chatellier flask and Blaine apparatus were used to find out the specific gravity and fineness of cement, respectively. River sand collected from Rupanarayan River was used. The tests on sand were carried out as per IS 2386 4. CSD procured from a crusher at Tamando near Bhubaneswar and passing 45 m IS sieve was used as powder to replace cement. The fineness of CSD was found out using Blaine apparatus. Crushed granite aggregate of different grading was tried. The characteristics of the materials used in the present study are given in Table 1. Since, CSD is used to replace cement, instead of its fineness modulus its fineness is reported in Table 1. Chemical composition of CSD is given in Table 2. X-ray diffraction (XRD) was used to determine the phase compositions of stone dust particles. The patterns were recorded on a Philips PW 1710 diffractometer, CuK (l = 1.5402 Ao) radiation. Patterns were collected as continuous scan between 20o to 100 o for stone dust with an increment of 0.05 o. The XRD tests results shown in Figure 1 reveal that silica content is more and confirm the chemical composition test (Table 2). To identify phases present in the stone dust samples, peak position from XRD graph were determined manually, these peak positions were checked against the JCPDS (www.icdd.com) Powder Diffraction File. The major component identified was SiO2, quartz (JCPDS # 46-1045).