Performance of Rice Straw Fibers on Hardened Concrete Properties under Effect of Impact Load and Gamma Radiation

Abstract

Concrete is an essential artificial building material in modern society. However, because concrete structures have brittle characteristics, they have a limited service life when subjected to dynamic loads. Nuclear emissions and explosions threaten human lives and structures’ safety due to harmful radiation and dynamic effects. Since agriculture has revealed a large amount of by-products that require disposal, the use of such by-products in many sectors is a challenge for contemporary studies. One of the most important areas for the disposal of such waste is construction, and concrete in particular. The utilization of the agricultural by-product rice straw fiber was chosen in this study to replace the usage of artificial fibers in concrete production and present an eco-friendly prospective contender with enhanced static/dynamic performance and gamma shielding characteristics. Different concrete mixtures were proposed in this study to evaluate the aforementioned characteristics. The designed concrete mixtures were conventional concrete with variations in the volume fraction of rice straw fibers (RSF) of 0%, 0.25%, 0.5%, and 0.75%. The desired static properties were compressive strength, splitting tensile strength, and flexural strength. Additionally, the drop weight impact test was used in this study to investigate the impact resistance of RSF-reinforced concrete. Finally, the radiation-shielding characteristic of the produced concrete was tested using the linear attenuation test. The results show that adding agricultural by-products of RSF in concrete production slightly enhanced the compressive strength by up to 7.0%, while it significantly improved the tensile and flexural properties by up to 17.1% and 25.8%, respectively. Additionally, a superior impact resistance of concrete was achieved by up to 48.6% owing to RSF addition. Furthermore, it enhanced the gamma shielding capability of concrete by up to 7.9%. The achievements in this study pave the way for utilizing RSF-reinforced concrete in various non-traditional applications.