Workability and Performance of High-Performance Concrete by Using Palm Oil Fuel Ash as a Cement Replacement Material

Abstract

AbstractMalaysia has been one of the world’s largest palm oil exporters which have been dealing with the issue of disposal of palm oil mill by-product known as palm oil fuel ash (POFA) over the years. However, over the past few years of research, this agro waste by-product has the potential to be utilized as construction material where it can be an alternative to conventional Ordinary Portland Cement (OPC). In the research, POFA is used as an alternative material to partially replace cement in concrete. The POFA used is treated to obtain the size of 212 microns before being used to partially replace cement by 0, 2.5, 5.0 and 7.5% of the cement weight. Workability properties of the concrete is covered by performing a slump test and flow table test. Whereas, the compressive and flexural test is conducted to obtain the mechanical properties of the concrete for curing age 1, 3, 7 and 28 days. It is revealed that the slump value increases as the POFA replacement percentage increases, however, the flow table shows a contradictory result. On the other hand, concrete with POFA shows enhanced mechanical properties, especially a 5% replacement percentage which is the optimum replacement level. Therefore, it is concluded that the inclusion of POFA in concrete thus improves the properties but only at an optimum level of replacement to cement.KeywordsPOFAWorkabilityCompressiveFlexural