Experimental Investigation of Engineering Properties of Iron-Based Binary and Ternary Pozzolanic Supplementary Cementitious Materials

The characteristic global warming potential of ordinary Portland cement (OPC) makes it a huge challenge for researchers to weigh its enormous use with potentially feasible engineering properties versus the environmental impacts. The formulation of sustainable, economical, and greener supplementary cementitious materials (SCMs) is an ongoing phenomenon, attracting the large-scale attention of industry/ academia. The formulation of ferrock by David Stone with low embodied energy, lower consumption of natural resources and minimal global warming potential has paved the way for the use of novel material comprising iron powder, pozzolans (pulverised fly ash (PFA) and metakaolin (MK) and lime exhibiting at par performance with OPC. However, a gap has been identified in its formulation, raising a further research question on how it will perform if PFA and MK are replaced by ground granulated blast furnace slag (GGBS) or other pozzolans like silica fume (SF) etc., with different mix ratios. Therefore, an endeavour has been made in this study to identify the engineering properties with sustainable use of modified binary and ternary pozzolans/ GGBS in place of 20% PFA in conventional ferrock. The conventional ferrock contains 8% MK and 20% PFA (as binary pozzolans), 60% iron powder, 12% lime and 2% oxalic acid (set 1). An effort has been made to formulate the different mixes of 10,20,30,40 and 50% by keeping 60% iron powder, 12% lime, 8% MK and 2% oxalic acid constant but replacing 20% PFA with 20% GGBS (set 2), with 10%PFA+10%GGBS (set 3) and with 10%PFA+10%SF (set 4). A target compressive strength of C32/40 or M40 concrete was selected for this study to achieve and compare results with the control mix (0% ferrock) and conventional ferrock during the experimental investigation of modified novel materials. 10-20% ratios of modified mixes exhibited the best performance and achieved the threshold strength of 60 MPa of high-strength cement concrete. Maximum compressive strength of 65 MPa was achieved by the 10% mix of set 2 (20% GGBS), followed by 20% mix ratios of set 3 (10%PFA+10%GGBS) and set 4 (10%PFA+10%SF), achieving 64 MPa. Whereas the 10% mix of the conventional ferrock (set1) reached 63 MPa strength, and the control mix with no ferrock gained 57 MPa strength at 56 days of curing. Overall, an increase of 2-13% compressive strength was observed with10- 30% mixes of all the SCMs; however, a decrease of 3-27% was observed with 40-50% use of SCMs. The use of iron powder increased the ductility of ferrock-based SCMs mixes and exhibited more flexural strength. Set 3 performed the best in exhibiting up to 5.8 MPa flexural strength, followed by set 4, set 2 and lastly, set 1 of conventional ferrock. 20% and 30% mix ratios exhibited flexural strength of more than 5% MPa, better than 10% and 40/ 50% mixes. The study supports the use of 10-20% ferrock-based SCMs for high-strength concrete and 10-50% for concrete mixes with a target strength of C32/40 or M40 to decrease the CO2 footprints of the construction industry significantly.