Water Retention Curve and Particle Breakage of Aggregates Recycled from Demolition Waste

CDW (construction and demolition wastes) present a high amount of aggregate chips covered with mortar. This results in high absorption of water with a direct impact in particle breakage or disaggregation. It is supposed that intra particle suction plays an important role in this phenomenon. However, WRCs (water retention curves) of CDW are not well understood. In this work, the WRCs of dynamically compacted specimens of aggregates recycled from the demolition of the National Stadium in Brasilia are studied. The objective of this study is to obtain WRCs of the recycled materials by using the pressure plate and filter paper methods. The breaking effect during compaction is quantified from the grain size distribution curves. The particle breakage during compaction increases when the energy is augmented. The results from the WRCs were incorporated into a pore size capillary model to predict pore size distribution.