Behaviour of concrete with PET bottles as fibers & silica fume as partial replacement of cement

Abstract

The primary objective of reducing plastic bottle disposal problems has been to enhance recycling. Waste can be decreased, and useable materials can be recovered as raw materials from waste. Poly Ethylene Terephthalate (PET) fibre was obtained in this investigation by manually cutting PET plastic drinking water bottles. There are large amounts of by-products and wastes generated by industries, including fly-ash, copper slag, Silica Fume(SF), etc., which can result in environmental and health issues upon dumping and disposal. To reduce these problems, the waste plastics and silica fume are efficiently used in this work. The waste PET bottles are transformed into 'O' shape PET fibres, which are added with concrete at a rate of 0.3 percent by weight of cement. Concrete that is properly mixed with silica fume can improve the mechanical and durability properties. At levels of 5% and 10%, silica fume is used to partially replace cement. The effect of PET fibre and silica fume on concrete hardened characteristics is examined. Concrete qualities such as compressive strength, split tensile strength, and flexural strength improve when up to 10% of cement is replaced with silica fume. In this research, at 28 days, with 10% cement replaced by silica fume and 0.3 percent O shape fibre, the maximum compressive strength 35.3 N/mm2, which is 12% greater than standard mix, the maximum split tensile strength is 3.89 N/mm2 which is 25.6% higher than the standard mix, the maximum flexural strength is 9.98 N/mm2 which is 99 % higher than the standard mix. Thus, concrete makes with silica fume at 10% replacement of cement and O shaped PET fibre 0.3% give the best results and it is recommended for concreting purpose.