Effect of binary and ternary blending of cement on properties of recycled aggregate concrete

Escalating the growth of industrialization and urbanization in the world demands the development of advanced infrastructure which in turn required a higher quality of raw materials. As cement is one of the major raw materials in concrete construction its demand for rising with the development of society. But the increased production of cement produces lots of environmental problems. So, there is a high requirement for a sustainable alternative of cement that have similar cementitious properties as cement. To address this problem experimental study is designed to use the binary blending of cement with rice husk ash (5%, 10%, 15% and 20%) as a replacement for cement. The study is further extended to analyse the effect of ternary blending of cement using further (5%, 10% and 15%) replacement of cement by sugarcane bagasse in optimum binary blended combination. Also, 25% of recycled fine aggregate is used in experiment as fine aggregate replacement throughout the mixes to achieve sustainability. Workability, compressive strength and flexural strength test were performed on concrete sample. The result of the study reveals that the workability of concrete mixes decreases with increases in the percentage of replacement both in binary and ternary mixes. In binary blending optimum strength is achieved at 15% replacement of cement with rice husk ash whereas in ternary blending 10% replacement by sugarcane bagasse ash with 15% rice hush ash was found optimum. Further, concrete shows 17.7% increase in compressive strength and 16% increase in flexural strength under the permissible value of workability. Study concluded that binary blending improve strength property and ternary blending further improve strength of concrete resulting in sustainability in construction.