International Journal of Civil and Structural Engineering Research ISSN 2348-7607 (Online) Vol. 6, Issue 2, pp: (22-26), Month: October 2018 - March 2019, Available at: www.researchpublish.com
Preliminary Studies on the Effect of Natural Organic Fibers on Cement 1
Shifana Fatima Kaafil, 2Shamim Shaukat Khan
Assistant Professor, Dar Al-Hekma University, Jeddah, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia Email: skaafil@dah.edu.sa, skhan@dah.edu.sa
Abstract: The main aim of this paper is to investigate the effect of use of organic (natural) fibers in cement. The natural fibers selected in this paper are human hair, jute and palm fibers. The percentage of fibers added is 2% with respect to weight of cement. The casted blocks are tested for its compressive strength, water absorption and density. The test results are compare with the conventional cement blocks casted under same conditions. It is found that cement blocks with jute fibers and hair fibers have more compressive strength than the conventional cement block. The cement block with palm fibers failed to give any compressive strength because of its bond strength with cement is weak. Keywords: Cement, Human hair, Jute fibers and Palm fibers.
1. INTRODUCTION Protecting the environment becomes mandatory for the researchers before implementing the new technology to ensure that there is no damage to environment and to be ecofriendly. Utilization of waste materials and renewable resources as alternative building materials have become the popular way to overcome the environmental problem in most countries[1]. The Portland cement concrete is a brittle material. It possesses a very low tensile strength, limited ductility and little resistance to cracking. Internal micro cracks are present in concrete and its poor tensile strength is due to propagation of such micro cracks leading to brittle fraction of concrete [2]. Fiber reinforced concrete (steel fiber or natural fiber) is gaining more attention in construction industry. Adding the short fiber reinforcement in low volumes (less than 2–3%) can increase the fracture toughness of concrete that will help to control the width of crack that form due to the volume changes in concrete [3]. The addition of fibers inside the concrete could increase its ductility. Addition of steel fibers reduced the micro cracks but over a long period it gets corroded due to various actions [4]. According to Saneepini and Krishna murthy[2] study on natural fibers, it is found that vegetable fibers (natural organic) are very much renewable, eco-friendly, economical and production cost is also very low compared to natural inorganic fibers. Natural organic fibers can be produced from a number of solid wastes such as bamboo, coconut, date palm, oil palm, sugarcane, and vegetable wastes. Some of these fibers are chemically more inert than either steel and glass fibers [5]. In general, the percentage of fibers selected vary from 0.5 to 3 % with respect to weight of the cement. Seneviratne et al., (2017)[6] mentioned that the test results with 2 % of coir fiber reinforced concrete gave an enhancement in compressive and flexural strength compared to other percentage of fibers. Hence, in this study, 2 % of fibers are added with respect to weight of cement and the natural organic fibers chosen are jute, palm and human hair. The fibers are added during the dry mix and it is scattered and crumbled. The CO2 emission from the concrete production is directly proportional to the cement content used in the concrete mix. 900 kg of CO 2 are emitted for the fabrication of every ton of cement [7]. In this paper, an attempt has made to reduce the usage of cement in order to reduce the emission of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere
2. MATERIALS AND TEST SETUP 2.1 Materials Ordinary Portland cement of grade 25 and well-graded fine aggregates of size 0.06 mm to 2 mm is used in this study. Human hairs are collected from beauty salon, fresh palm fibers are collected from trees and jute fibers are collected from used rice bags. All the three fibers are cut into crumbs of different sizes and are shown in Fig.1. Sieve analysis has been carried out separately for all the three fibers to make sure the fibers are well graded.
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