FLY ASH BASED GEOPOLYMER PASTE USING ROMANIAN LOCAL SOURCE MATERIALS - PRELIMINARY RESULTS.

The benefit of recycling industrial by-products in the construction industry led to growing interest in exploring and potentially exploiting these by-products, in the context of sustainable development, and in creating new materials. Fly ash is a type of byproduct waste, having enjoyed considerable attention, especially from the perspective of creating and perfecting fly ash based geopolymer concrete. In Romania, over 80% of industrial waste is deposited, this being the most widely used method of waste disposal. This creates the premises of potentially using this waste as a source material in producing fly ash based geopolymer concrete. In order to obtain a material with desirable compressive strength, the mix design of geopolymers needs to be carefully studied and much research remains to be conducted. The aim of this paper is to present the preliminary results for producing fly ash-based geopolymer paste, using Romanian local source materials and to open new perspectives on the global existing research agenda about the production of fly ash-based geopolymer concrete. Preliminary results shown a compressive strength of the fly ash-based geopolymer paste between 7 and 25 MPa, at 2, and 7 days, respectively when keeping the fly ash/alkaline liquid ratio constant and different Na2SiO3 solution/NaOH solution ratios, with NaOH solution concentration of 8M. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]