A comprehensive investigation into the effect of water to cement ratio and powder content on mechanical properties of self-compacting concrete

•The effect of w/c ratio and powder content on mechanical properties were studied.•With increase of limestone powder, the compressive and tensile strengths increase.•In lower w/c, limestone powder increases the compressive strength more noticeably.•w/c ratio has greater effect on tensile and compressive strengths than E-modulus. Self compacting concrete (SCC), as an innovative construction material in concrete industry, offers a safer and more productive construction process due to favorable rheological performance which is caused by SCC’s different mixture composition. This difference may have remarkable influence on the mechanical behavior of SCC as compared to normal vibrated concrete (NVC) in hardened state. Therefore, it is vital to know whether the use of all assumptions and relations that have been formulated for NVC in current design codes are also valid for SCC. Furthermore, this study presents an extensive evaluation and comparison between mechanical properties of SCC using current international codes and predictive equations proposed by other researchers. Thus, in this experimental study, key mechanical properties of SCC are investigated for sixteen SCC mixes with different w/c ratios and different powder contents. In the present study, an extensive data reported by many researchers for SCC and NVC has been used to validate the obtained results.