Mechanical Properties of Steel Fibre Reinforced Lightweight Concrete by Incorporating Recycled Car Waste Tyres Aggregate

Abstract

Waste tyre synthetic rubber chip (WTSRC) obtained from passenger cars has been long neglected by waste tyre recycling industry mainly due to market demands in tyre rethread products and crumb rubber by-products such as rubber safety mats. This paper looked at the different mechanical properties in WTSRC and waste tyre natural rubber chip (WTNRC). To achieve unit weight of 1800 kg/m3 (±200), different mixture of crumb rubber (CR) in the form of natural rubber chip (NRC) and synthetic rubber chip (SRC) in the ratio of 100% to 0%, 80% to 20%, 60% to 40% was evaluated by incorporating Steel fibre (SF) in different volume faction (Vf) of 0, 0.2, 0.4 to develop a lightweight concrete (LWC) of 10 MPa as an aggregate substitution. Concrete tests such as slump test, compressive strength test, splitting tensile test and ultrasonic pulse velocity test were studied in this research. Although the tests showed that increasing in SF decrease the workability, but also proves that with the right percentage of SF inclusion can improve the mechanical properties of the lightweight concrete, and from the result the maximum compressive strength had achieved at about 14.5 MPa at 28 days. The finding of this investigation shows that correct mixture in NRC and SRC with the incorporating of SF has promising result strength required as hybrid LWC as sustainable alternative in the construction materials industry.