Performance of FRC Produced with Mineral Admixtures and Waste Plastic Fibers Under Sulfate Attack

Fiber reinforce concrete has been in use for more than 30 years now. It is a kind of high strength concrete used in construction industry particularly for structures carrying tensile loads. Use of fiber reinforced concrete imparts higher tensile, flexural strength, shear strength and crack resistance property to the structure. Also it is seen that FRC can be used in the construction in sulfate environment as the steel fibers help in resisting deterioration of concrete due to sulfate ions. But production of FRC is quite expensive. Currently construction industry is focusing more on low cost construction by different ways like by replacing cement by some of the mineral admixtures that are actually waste products and hence if properly used in concrete can reduce the cost of concrete. Replacing steel fibers with waste plastic fibers will also reduce the cost provided that the replacement percentage is low. Here in this work an effort is made to develop FRC by replacing a part of cement by mineral admixtures Viz., Ground granulated blast furnace slag, Silica fume, Metakaolin and steel fibers by Waste plastic fibers. And the samples thus produced will be subjected to sulfate attack by immersing them in sulfate solution for a period of 90days and these samples were then tested for their strength Viz., Compression, tensile, Flexure and shear. It was seen that we can effectively replace cement by 20% and that too replacing cement with GGBS is more beneficial as it does not reduce strength as much as it can be seen with other mineral admixtures. Also we can replace steel fibers by 50% by waste plastic fibers.