Study of structural behaviour of geopolymer concrete to check the applicability of Eurocode 2

Abstract

Global climate change has been a huge matter of concern
today. While there are several factors that contribute to greenhouse gases,
adversely affecting the planet, CO2 emission is one of them. It is said that 8%
of total carbon dioxide emission is caused due to the production of Ordinary
portland cement used for concrete in construction. The construction industry
highly relies upon concrete as a major and widely used construction material.
Solutions to reduce the production of Portland cement without having to
entirely remove concrete as a building material has been an important
discussion. A possible solution is to replace the Portland cement in concrete
with industrial by-products further activating the binder with alkali
activators producing a green concrete called ‘Geopolymer concrete’ (GPC) which
would reduce CO2 emission.  The biggest
challenge yet is that, designing any structure, a standard validated code/regulation
is required and GPC doesn’t have a standard code of practice. All the
concretecodes till now are formulated taking the parameters for Ordinary
Portland cement concrete. This lack of design models specifically formulated
for GPC restricts contractorsand engineers to use GPC in structures. This is
why GPC has not gained much acceptance in practice.  This research was done in collaboration with
Boskalis. A bridge (KW15-N69) has beenconstructed using geopolymer concrete in
North Brabant province of the Netherlands.To make the bridge sustainable and
circular, the GPC used contained no cement andaggregates were fully replaced by
thermally recycled asphalt aggregates. For design ofthe bridge, Eurocode 2 for
concrete structures was used and additionally regulations by Dutch ministry of
transport and infrastructure was followed.This research will act asone of the
pioneer studies to investigate the overall structural behaviour of
geopolymerconcrete beams with respect to standard codes which should help design
engineers upto some extent to execute and design structures using GPC in
future.