EXPERIMENTAL INVESTIGATION OF THE EFFECT OF NANO AND MICRO SILICA ON THE BEHAVIOR OF REINFORCED CONCRETE SLABS

Abstract

Material technology has evolved greatly over the past decades, where new materials are being designed and fabricated to fulfill specific needs. The field of nano and micro particles has prosperous in many disciplines, it has been recently used in reinforced concrete in production of high-strength, high-performance concrete. Micro silica (MS) and nano silica (NS) particles have proven to be highly beneficial to the concrete mix, concretes have become denser with considerable improvement in their mechanical characteristics in particular compressive strength. This research includes a comparative study of the bending behavior of conventional reinforced concrete (without MS or NS) slabs with eight other slabs each possessing various mix of MS particles and NS incorporated into the concrete mix. The cement content utilized in the slabs is maintained constant by replacing a portion of the cement by an equivalent amount of either NS or MS particles or both. MS particles are altered from 0, 5 and 10% while NS particles are altered from 0, 0.5 and 1.0%. Results indicate that incorporating both NS and MS in the concrete mix has many merits such as increases in mechanical properties, fewer cracks with fewer crack widths, and higher final load bearing capacity.