Project Summary
As an energy-intensive industry, concrete construction and maintenance activities pose tremendous negative environmental impacts, such as greenhouse gases emissions and landfilling problems. Therefore, it is indispensable to develop new technologies, which can expand the application of recycled materials, to reduce the negative environmental impacts of concrete constructions and maintenance activities, and improve waste management and recycling process. Although the re-use of low-cost or recycled materials for preparing “green” concrete has increasingly attracted attention in recent years, the research on use of multi-scale modifiers to improve the mechanical properties and the durability of high performance concrete which is made of low-cost or recycled materials as cementitious binders is still limited. In this project, recycled coal fly ash will be used as cementitious binder materials, and multiple scale cost-effective materials will be used as modifiers to prepare “green” concrete. The strength and durability of the “green” concrete will be tested. The microstructures will be observed to elucidate the mechanisms of reinforcement the “green” concrete.
