Understanding the mining waste as resources in self-compacting concrete: A numerical study on sustainable construction

Abstract

To achieve effective resources conservation mechanism and efficient waste management system, recent studies more focused on converting the waste into useful resources in different applications. Construction sector is one of the key sector for development and consumes high quantity of resources, hence, to tackle the high consumption, studies started to introduce waste materials (for ex: fly ash) as replacement of conventional building materials. Such waste material inclusion becomes very popular in concrete applications. However, some of the waste material do have the potential to be a better replacement of conventional concrete materials, which are limited in the existing studies, especially mining waste. This study focused on this gap, by introducing mining waste as potential replacement material in concrete applications, in specific to self-compacting concrete. This step will move forward the existing construction sector towards sustainability by adopting sustainable construction concepts. Despite of these significances, there are very smaller number of studies are reported with the application of mining waste in self compacting concrete. This study focused on this issue by analyzing the existing challenges involved in the inclusion of mining waste in self compacting concrete applications. A numerical modelling has been included in the study to understand and analyze the interrelationship and interdependencies among the collected challenges. With the results of the study, the challenges for sustainable construction through the inclusion of mining waste in self compacting concrete can be eliminated.