Abstract
Nowadays, industry plays one of the main roles in daily life. Extractive industry is one of the oldest industries, present in almost each country. Unfortunately, besides the benefits connected with development of the extractive industry, there are also disadvantages such as enlarging amounts of stored industrial wastes. One of the ideas how to manage with unnecessary wastes is geopolymer, relatively new material which parameters are similar to the parameters of the concrete. The paper shows the following attempts to define optimal mixture composition of geopolymer based on the wastes from the coal mine and geopolymer based on the shale from the post-mining spoil tip. Coal mine waste, shale, powdered glass waste, metakaolin and sand were used as the raw materials. Sodium hydroxide and sodium silicate were used as activators. Mixtures consisting of mentioned components used in different ratios were prepared and poured into small moulds. The compressive strength of samples was tested after 3, 5 and 7 days. From the best mixture, the bigger samples of dimensions 4x4x4cm were prepared and tested after 7 and 14 days. The paper presents characteristics of used wastes, preparation and curing processes, test procedure and finally, compressive strengths and densities of tested geopolymers.
Highlights
Mining is a sector of the industry which plays an important role in many countries
Samples made of mixture M-I-2 obtained the highest compressive strength
Except of the mixture M-I-1, all mixtures based on the waste from the coal mine obtained better compressive strengths than mixtures based on the shale from the post-mining spoil tip
Summary
Mining is a sector of the industry which plays an important role in many countries. During the mining process, particular geological materials are extracted from the earth. The rest of material which is useless for further works is called industrial wastes or tailings. Such wastes are stored in different ways in dependence on the kind of waste. Recycling of the tailings is one of the possible ideas how to solve the problem of waste’s storage. The addition of particular wastes to the concrete mixture is well known and commonly used procedure, the wastes state only a small part within the rest of compounds. As the response to the problem of unnecessary wastes and partly because of the need for new solutions there came into existence the idea of geopolymer – the building material based almost entirely on the industrial wastes. The main goal of the research was to define the optimal mixture composition for these two geopolymers
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