Mechanical Properties of Concrete Using Recycled Plastic

Abstract

Concrete is the most common material for human beings to use in construction. In this study, the behavior of the recycled plastic as aggregate in concrete has been investigated on compressive, tensile, and flexural strengths, weight reduction and workability. Also the impact resistance of concrete contains plastic aggregate has been carried out deeply in this study. Polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottles, one of the waste plastic types, is used in this study .The reason to choose the PET bottles to develop a novel method to transfer it to valuable product and to solve the problem of dumping the tons of plastic waste, also PET bottles not used to produce any recycled material locally in Gaza Strip due to the difficulties in recycling it. A series of four concrete mixes were prepared with replacement ratios of PET 0%, 15%, 30%, and 45% by volume of natural aggregate. Also the same ratios used by adding PET without replacing the natural aggregate in the impact resistance test. Special impact machine was designed and fabricated adopting the technique of drop weight impact test in ACI committee 544. The results of experiments show the feasibility to use PET plastic in concrete mixes. There is a possibility to produce concrete with reduction in weight reaches to 12% compared to traditional concrete in case of replacing 45% of natural aggregate by PET aggregate. No significant changes are observed for mixtures containing up to 15% of PET-aggregates in compressive strength results, for 30% and 45% PET replacement there is a noticeable reduction in compressive strength up to 11% and 24% respectively. The results reveal that the capacity of concrete to resist impact loading at failure can be improved by increasing the content of PET.