Assessment of dispersion potential of discarded coconut fibres in concrete pavements

KHUTE S; ZERBINO, R.; SING S; GETTU, R.

Earl's Regency, Tennekumbura, Sri Lanka

Conferencia; 13th International Conference on Sustainable Built Environment (ICSBE 2022); 2022

University of Peradeniya

Natural fibres (coir) have been preferred over their counterparts on account of lower cost, renewability, and accessibility of supply. Generally, Coir fibres having a length greater than 50 mm are considered for various civil engineering applications and the shorter ones are typically discarded/incinerated. The use of these discarded coir fibres (DCF) for concrete pavements seems to be a sustainable approach; however, their lower densities and hydrophilic nature makes concrete manufacturing challenging. To address this, a framework has been developed in the present study primarily to uniformly distribute the DCF in concrete. The present study investigates the distribution of coir fibres in fresh concrete as well as in the hardened state. Coir fibre of lengths 10 mm and 50 mm with a dosage of 0.1, 0.4, and 0.7% by volume of concrete was used, considering different mixing approaches. The coefficient of variation (%) is quantified to assess the distribution of DCF in the fresh concrete and the results revealed that the dispersion of DCF in concrete decreases with an increase in length and dosage. Hardened concrete fracture surfaces were evaluated to assess the fibre dispersion and orientation. The fibre density was found to be less in concrete with low volume fibre dosage, while more in high volume fibre dosage. Further, it was observed that fiber density was higher in the perpendicular direction to the casting face