Abstract:
The majority of the aluminum market involves the consumption of aluminum sheets, primarily shaped into drink cans. These cans become a significant source of virgin aluminum waste. While materials such as steel and polythene are used as replacements for concrete in various applications, they present certain issues: steel can corrode, and polythene can suffer from shrinkage and thermal conduction problems. Consequently, using recycled aluminum as a solution to these problems is a promising approach. This study aims to emphasize the importance of using self-compacting concrete reinforced with recycled aluminum fibers, focusing on its resistance to bending and compression. Additionally, it seeks to determine the relationship between these two resistances. Understanding these relationships would simplify the characterization of the mechanical behavior of concrete fiber, enabling it to be based on a relatively limited number of standard tests. The primary objective is to investigate the relationships between the compressive and flexural responses of concrete fiber and to quantify the effect of introducing various volume fractions of recycled aluminum fiber from cans in self-compacting concrete under compression and bending forces. Fiber fractions ranging from 1% to 5% were used, along with control concrete without fibers. The results demonstrated that both compression and bending strengths increased with the fiber fraction up to 3%. However, at fiber fractions of 4% and above, the properties were negatively affected up to the point of crack formation (or maximum resistance in compression). Consequently, the post-crack bending strength decreased significantly.
