Chloride penetration resistance of concrete containing ground fly ash, bottom ash and rice husk ash

This research presents the effect of various ground pozzolanic materials in blended cement concrete on the strength and chloride penetration resistance. An experimental investigation dealing with concrete incorporating ground fly ash (GFA), ground bottom ash (GBA) and ground rice husk ash (GRHA). The concretes were mixed by replacing each pozzolan to Ordinary Portland cement at levels of 0%, 10%, 20% and 40% by weight of binder. Three different water to cement ratios (0.35, 0.48 and 0.62) were used and type F superplasticizer was added to keep the required slump. Compressive strength and chloride permeability were determined at the ages of 28, 60, and 90 days. Furthermore, using this experimental database, linear and nonlinear multiple regression techniques were developed to construct a mathematical model of chloride permeability in concretes. Experimental results indicated that the incorporation of GFA, GBA and GRHA as a partial cement replacement significantly improved compressive strength and chloride penetration resistance. The chloride penetration of blended concrete continuously decreases with an increase in pozzolan content up to 40% of cement replacement and yields the highest reduction in the chloride permeability. Compressive strength of concretes incorporating with these pozzolans was obviously higher than those of the control concretes at all ages. In addition, the nonlinear technique gives a higher degree of accuracy than the linear regression based on statistical parameters and provides fairly reasonable absolute fraction of variance (R2) of 0.974 and 0.960 for the charge passed and chloride penetration depth, respectively.