Abstract
Since waste tires constitute a serious environmental concern, several studies are devoted to the use of finely divided recycled rubber for the production of rubberized concrete by partial substitution of the mineral aggregate fraction. The introduction of rubber into concrete presents several advantages (e.g., improvement of toughness and thermal/electrical/acoustic insulation capacities). Unfortunately, the addition of a high content of rubber into concrete causes an important loss of mechanical resistance of the final composite. In this context, several scientific studies are devoted to investigate the best technical solutions for favoring the interfacial adhesion between rubber and cement paste, but the interpretation of the literature is often misleading. To overcome this issue, the metadata extrapolated from the single scientific works were critically re-analyzed, forming reference diagrams where the variability fields of the different rubber concrete formulations (in terms of mechanical responses as a function of the rubber content) were defined and the best performances discussed. This study evidenced the twofold role of reference diagrams, able in both presenting the data in an unambiguous manner (for a successful comparison) and providing the guidelines for future works in this research field.
Highlights
Along with human activities, the solid waste increment in landfills opened a Pandora’s box related to the end-of-life waste management, prompting worldwide researchers to identify the best technologies for favoring waste disposal and their recycling, aiming at environmental and economic sustainability [1,2,3,4,5,6,7]
We provide a rational evaluation of the experimental results reported in the literature, first by building a reference diagram that shows the variability of mechanical response of different rubber concrete formulations
Among the different classes of human-derived technological wastes, end-of-life rubber tires caught the attention of worldwide experts since, from one side, they are potentially dangerous for both environment and human health if normally landfilled or thermally converted, whereas from the other side they can be extremely appealing if re-processed to produce useful products
Summary
The solid waste increment in landfills opened a Pandora’s box related to the end-of-life waste management, prompting worldwide researchers to identify the best technologies for favoring waste disposal and (if possible) their recycling, aiming at environmental and economic sustainability [1,2,3,4,5,6,7]. Materials 2020, 13, 1234 rodents during landfilling, or being a source of dioxins and other volatile pollutants during combustion) with serious risk to human health [20,21] For all these reasons, rubber tires are preferentially treated via milling to produce granulates, chips, powders and textiles, making them exploitable in several advanced applications [19]. Despite the many benefits given by the introduction of rubber in concrete, a significant reduction of both the mechanical resistance and specific mass has been registered These side-effects are attributable to the different mechanical response of the rubber component compared to the mineral aggregates, but mainly to the poor interfacial adhesion between the rubber element with the cement paste [23,24], which significantly reduces the loadable quantity of rubber in concrete. The final goal is to provide a preliminary assessment tool (to be adopted in future research) that allows a rapid estimation of the mechanical behavior of the produced material relative to the performance of current state-of-the-art tools
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