Development of Drainage Material Using Rice Husk Cement Mortar with Foam

Nowadays, interest in developing environmental friendly construction material was increased. As the result, many researches have been done to make use of waste material for engineering purposes. This paper present the results of laboratory experiments on the potential of raw rice husk (RH) cement mortar with addition of foam as drainage material. Mechanical properties which are compressive strength, density, water absorption and porosity have been investigated in order to identify the potential of this material to function as drainage material. Total of eight set of sample were tested to determine those properties. Aqueous foam generated from chemical based foaming agent was used in this study to enhance the drainage ability and also reducing the density of the cement based mixture. More over to simulate the real application at site, an infiltration model was developed to determine the drainage and infiltration characteristic of this material. The permeability of the sample used in the infiltration model has been tested using constant head test to verify the validity of the infiltration model. From the result obtained, it can be concluded that the compressive strength and density of sample decreases with percentage of raw rice husk used while the additional of foam has further reducing the compressive strength and density. Both water absorption and porosity showing the opposite trend compared to the compressive strength. This drainage material can be pre-designed between 1.60N/mm2 – 10.12 N/mm2 for compressive strength, 1392kg/m3 - 1841kg/m3 for density, 21% - 34% for water absorption and 31% - 42% for porosity. From the result of infiltration model, it was observed that this material having good drainage ability with the permeability of 15% foamed rice husk sample is 1.57x10-3.