Abstrait

Feasibility Study on Application of Blast Furnace Slag in Pavement Concrete

B G Buddhdev, Dr. H R Varia

Concrete is the most-used man-made product in the world. Concrete is widely used for making many types of structural components for different civil engineering applicat ions. In this modern era, cement concrete pavements are in demand as compared to bituminous pavements in highway projects. Due to limitat ion of quality natural resources for making concrete, the waste utilizat ion in production of concrete especially for pavements are major concern in advances of civil engineering. Blast furnace slag is one of the wastes produced from steel processing plants around the globe. Rajkot (Gujarat) is well known for its small scale industries for long time and one of the fastest developing cities of India is hub of steel and allied industries. Rajkot itself produces blast furnace slag of amount 2500T/month from its 2000 steel processing units. This enormous quantity of blast furnace slag is generally dumped in unscientific manner create environmental issues and little is used for landfill purpose without any technical input. It is interesting to know whether Blast Furnace Slag (BFS) can be utilized as a fine aggregates (i.e. as a sand) to produce concrete mainly for pavements or not. In this paper, the comprehensive experimental programme is taken up to study the feasibility of this BFS used as a fine aggregate in pavement concrete. In this regard the chemical and physical properties of the BFS are observed in this study. These properties depend upon the raw materials used and methods of processing at plants. Based on results of experimentation, variations in chemical and physical properties are studied and checked the suitability of utilizing this BFS for pavement concrete. The results indicate that BFS can be utilized as a fine aggregate in pavement concrete.