EXPERIMENTAL STUDY ON COMPRESSIVE AND FLEXURAL STRENGTH OF USING FIBRE REINFORCEMENT & METAKAOLIN AS PARTIAL REPLACEMENT OF CEMENT

Concrete is probably the most extensively used construction material in the world. The main ingredient in the conventional concrete is Portland cement. The amount of cement production emits approximately equal amount of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Cement production is consuming significant amount of natural resources. That has brought pressures to reduce cement consumption by the use of supplementary materials. Availability of mineral admixtures marked opening of a new era for designing concrete mix of higher and higher strength. GROUND GRANULATED BLAST FURNACE SLAG (GGBS) is a new mineral admixture, whose potential is not fully utilized. Moreover only limited studies have been carried out in India on the use of slag for the development of high strength concrete with addition of steel fibres The study focuses on the flexural strength performance of the blended concrete containing 20% percentage of GGBS and different %s of steel fibres as a partial replacement of OPC. The cement in concrete is replaced accordingly with the percentage of 20% by weight of GGBS and 1%, 2%, 3% by weight of steel fiber. Concrete Samples are tested at the age of 7 and 28 days of curing. Finally, the strength performance of slag blended fiber reinforced concrete is compared with the performance of control mix. From the experimental investigations, it has been observed that, the optimum replacement of 20% of Ground Granulated Blast Furnace Slag to cement and steel fiber of 2% with respect to the weight of cement showed improved better results in flexural strength and proved to be optimum proportion when compared with other proportions with respect to strength and economy.