A Comparative Study on the Mechanical Properties of Normal and Rubberized Green Concrete

Abstract

The concrete industry is one of the main consumers of natural resources. On the other hand, one of today’s major environmental problems is non-decaying waste tires left in the environment. This study utilizes the waste tires in C-25 concrete grade and investigates its behavior with rebar. An experimental study was carried out on the basic mechanical properties of concrete. A modified concrete was prepared by replacing sand in concrete with rubber aggregate by varying the replacement proportion from 4% to 16% with an increment of 4% by volume. After having the mechanical property, an effective finite element model was developed in ANSYS workbench. The stress-strain diagram from the experiment was described by command and used as input data in ANSYS simulation to analyze and determine the impact of resistance and deformation of rubberized concrete. From the experiment, it was found that the optimal rubber improves the strain capacity and its stress-strain curve shows more nonlinear behavior than normal concrete (NC). From all percentages, 8% crumb rubber concrete (CRC8) shows best relative performance it improves impact resistance, energy absorption and ductility of concrete by decreasing the weight of the structure. At failure, crumb rubber concrete (CRC) exhibited more ductility with large ultimate deflection and more uniform crack distribution. The bond behavior of CRC8 with the deformed bar is only slightly lower than NC. ANSYS output result shows that the structural behavior like maximum stress is comparable except the reduction in compressive strength. The results of FEA positively verified that rubberized concrete could absorb more impact energy before failure.