Abstract

Experimental Study on Class F Fly Ash Cement Bricks Using Partial Replacement of Fly Ash by Metakaolin

Author(s): K. Muhammad Nisham, M. B Sridhar and V. Vignesh Kumar

Normal fly ash brick and burnt clay brick is an olden building material which is used for housing in urban area as well as rural part of India. The bricks are manufactured from natural clay, which is obtained from agricultural land. Excess usage of agricultural land for this clay results in loss of good fertile quality of soil and diversion of agricultural land for brick manufacturing. The modified Fly Ash bricks are an alternative for the conventional bricks which can be used effectively to replace the conventional bricks. Various properties of these bricks were studied by different researchers and they understood these bricks can be used for construction of low cost houses. This paper is an attempt to study the durability and strength aspect of bricks prepared using class F fly ash, Cement, metakaolin and quarry dust. The experiment work also investigated the effectmetakaolin content in class F fly ash cement brick based on trial and error mix proportion methods. The experiment are conducted in two phases to observe the properties i.e. compressive strength and water absorption of fly ash cement brick. In both phase the cement (10%) and quarry dust (35%, 30%) are kept constant and class f fly ash (55% to 35%, 60% to 40 %) is replaced with white metakaolin up to 20 percentage. The fly ash based cement bricks are tested after 7 days, 14 days and 28 days curing in advanced concrete research laboratory of the institute. The test results showed that, the maximum optimized compressive strength is obtained for optimal mix proportion percentage of class F fly ash 40%, cement 10%, quarry dust 35% and metakaolin 15%. In both phases of experiment observed that there is a decrease (Inadequate value) in water absorption ratio of fly ash brick while using metakaolin powder.