Abstract
For centuries, the Granite have been used as a lavish, high-end building material with a rich history due to its strength and beauty. Ancient monuments and buildings made from granite still are standing today. Among these granites, the Granitic batholith Karakoram, in the village of Chitral has tremendous potential to be used as aggregates for heavy duty concrete floor, dimension stone, asphalt and concrete work and other engineering projects. The current study focused on the physcio-mehcnial properties and petrographic characterization of the granitic batholith to highlight the importance of these rocks as a regional geoheritage diversity for construction industry. The interrelationship between the mechanical properties and petrographic features of granites were studied. Field observation shows that the granites are sub-equigranular to inequigranular, coarse to fine grained and without any preferred orientation. Different textural varieties of granites (coarse-grained, fine-grained) were collected. Based on the experimental results, the Petrographic studies demonstrate euhedral to subhedral grains. The fine-grained granite yield more UCS (169.55 MPa) than coarse-grained granite (79.46 MPa) due to its less degree of mineral alteration, fine grains size, relatively low porosity (0.43%) and water absorption (0.39%). Based on physico-mechanical properties including unconfined compressive strength (UCS), specific gravity, water absorption, porosity, soundness, and Loss Angeles abrasion (L.A), the fine-grained granite can be used variety of construction materials, while the coarse grained granite cannot be used as building stone and asphalt in roads. However, petrographic investigations reveal that both fine and coarse grained varieties contain less than 5 percent of strained quartz, which categories these rocks as innocuous for Alkali Silica Reaction (ASR) but according to alkali silica reactivity test (Chemical method ASTM C 289-02) the fine grained variety is considered as innocuous and the coarse grained variety as deleterious.
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