Paper Details

Due to excessive usage of natural coarse aggregates, the light weight concrete produced from industrial wastepolystyrene is viable source of structural light weight aggregate material. The usage of PLCA (polystyrene lightweightcoarse aggregates) concrete reduces considerably the self-weight of structure. The structural member produced fromutilising PLCA in concrete production not only solves the problem of polystyrene waste disposal but also helps conservenatural resources.This paper presents the results of extensive tests to investigate the mixing proportion, density, mechanical properties(compressive strength, flexural strength and tensile strength) of lightweight concrete made of polystyrene aggregateswith the strength level of 7 to 19.1 MPa and the corresponding density of 15.24 kN/m3 to 24.18 kN/m3.Material variables include the volume and composition of cement, natural sand, polystyrene aggregate content byvolume. Particular emphasis has been given to study the effect of concrete density on compressive strength, tensilestrengths, flexural and workability. To exploit the potential of using polystyrene concrete as structural element, furtherstudy has been carried out on the flexural behaviour of polystyrene concrete beams with limited experimental data.The concrete strength is targeted at 20 MPa for all the beams. Experimental results showed that the compressive, tensileand flexural strength of polystyrene aggregate concrete decreases as the decrease in density of PLCA concrete. It is alsoobserved that the concrete segregate at lower percentage replacement of natural aggregates with PLCA.

Mayur A. Banarase, Prof. Avinash D. Jakate, “EXPERIMENTAL STUDY ON ARTIFICIAL LIGHTWEIGHT AGGREGATE USING POLYSTYRENE”, International Journal of Advance Engineering and Research Development (IJAERD), Vol. 1, Issue 8, pp. 162-174, August 2014.