Concrete Performance Using Treated POFA as a Partial Replacement of Cement

Abstract

Palm oil is used to produce cooking oil and its waste is called palm oil fuel ash (POFA). POFA is one of the wastes that have same chemical properties as cement, which is silica and calcium oxide. Demand for cement used in concrete was high. The cement is not suitable for a sustainable environment as cement industry is the primary producers of carbon dioxide (CO2). The aim of this study is to investigate water absorption on various molarity of treated POFA in 10% of replacement of cement in concrete and to study the effect of optimum molarity of treated POFA towards the compressive strength with 10% replacement of cement in concrete. POFA was treated in the environmental laboratory by using various molarity of sulphuric acid, H2SO4. Then, the treated POFA has been partially replaced by cement of 10% in order to cast a concrete mix on 50 × 50 × 50 mm mould. The cubes samples were being produced to test the compressive strength and water absorption by following the British Standard to check the effect of the treatment of the POFA. From the result obtained, concrete with partially replacement of cement by using POFA treated 5M of sulphuric acid is the optimum value that gets from the compressive strength test and achieved the design strength which is M30. The values for the 5M treated POFA and ordinary portland cement (OPC) were compared and the result is 44.77 and 47.26 N/mm2, respectively. The higher the molarity of the sulphuric acid, the lower the compressive strength achieved.