Experiment on strength and permeability of recycled aggregate pervious concrete

Abstract: To prepare pervious concrete with recycled concrete aggregate is a hot point and the trend of the current research, while strength and water permeability are the key performance highlighted and to be broken through at present. With waste prefabricated concrete beam members as the source of recycled aggregate, pervious concrete was prepared, and 6 groups of mixture ratios were designed with water cement ratio of 0.3 and sand ratio of 10% as the benchmark. Besides, through the experiment on test cubes under standard maintenance, the porosity, water permeability and strength performance of recycled aggregate pervious concrete (RPC) under a single factor were studied. The grain size of coarse aggregate was 4.75-9.5 mm and the natural coarse aggregate (NCA) came from gravels. With the pervious concrete prepared with 100% recycled coarse aggregate as the benchmark, 5 kinds of pervious concretes were designed on the premise of not changing the water-binder ratio and sand ratio: 1) ordinary pervious concrete (wholly made of natural aggregate); 2) equivalent replacement of 20% cement with fly ash; 3) equivalent replacement of 6% cement with silica fume; 4) adding naphthalene superplasticizer equivalent to 1% of the mass of the cement; 5) external addition of steel fiber equivalent to 3% of the mass of the cement. To reduce the influence of the high water absorption of the recycled coarse aggregate, the method of increasing additional water compensation was adopted and the amount of additional water was determined as the amount of water absorbed in 10 min by the recycled coarse aggregate. On the basis of the test and research of the capillary water absorption of concrete by predecessors, a capillary water absorption device for pervious concrete was self-made. It was measured in the experiment that the range of porosity, permeability coefficient and compressive strength was 17.8%-23.8%, 0.27-0.57 cm/s and 4.0-9.63 MPa respectively. According to these results, the basic performance of pervious concrete made of recycled aggregate could satisfy the requirements. Compared with RPC, adding fly ash could realize effective improvement of the compressive strength of the pervious concrete to 9.63 MPa, an increase of about 44%, the external addition of steel fiber could improve the water permeability, and the mixing of naphthalene super plasticizer and silica fume didn't have obvious effect. Admixtures and additives would both exert adverse effect on the splitting tensile strength, and their affecting degree was super plasticizer, fly ash < silica fume < steel fiber. The ratio of the measured splitting tensile strength to the compressive strength (ratio of tension to compression) was 9.5%-16.9%, with the average value being 13.5%. The water permeability increased with the increase of the porosity, and the two presented an exponential relationship, which was basically consistent with the description of ordinary pervious concrete. In addition, it was figured out in the experiment that the maximum capillary water absorption height was 19.4 mm, and the maximum immersion amount in capillary water absorption was 0.01 g/cm3; the water absorption height of RPC internally doped with 20% fly ash was about 13.5 mm, while the amount of water absorbed was about 28 g, both values being consistent with the test results of capillary water absorption of existing ordinary concrete in terms of the order of magnitude. In nondestructive condition, the capillary water absorption process of previous concrete made of recycled aggregate was similar with that of ordinary concrete, namely, fast absorption in the early stage and steady absorption in the late stage.