Track: Environmental Engineering and Management
Abstract
Geopolymer concrete concept has attracted more attention during the last two decades due to its superior properties, that has made it good and a potential alternative to ordinary Portland cement. The variable parameters used to study their effects on concrete mix formulated are water concentration and acid concentration which were varied between 2-5 ml for acid and 5-10 ml for water concentrations respectively as the chosen boundary values. These two variables were selected to optimize the chosen key factors such as the silicate (SiO2) and alumina (Al2O3) contents of the mix. These were inputted respectively on the design of experiment interface tool, studied the effects as responses and the data obtained inputted back into the software for analysis of variance and optimization study. The mass to volume variation trends recorded for silicate (SiO2) and alumina (Al2O3) were 23.1 to 20.3 kg/m3 and 6.1 to 5.1 kg/m3 respectively within the investigation period. The silica to alumina ratio and silica to magnesium ratio of the geopolymer concrete contents were established to be 3.7 and 5.5 respectively which were within the range of specifications. It is also concluded that, the optimum acid treatment was established as evidence from the R2-values of both silica and alumina which were close to 1 and the error difference between the predicted and validated values of 2.9 and 3.0 % for the silica and alumina respectively. The models therefore, are significant as their probability greater than F-value are less than 0.05 in each case.