Experimental Study of Mechanical Properties of Rice Husk Ash - Cement Concrete Made from Magnetized and Normal Water

This work aims at comparing the mechanical properties of Rice-Husk-Ash-Cement (RHA) concrete produced from magnetized water and normal water. Cement was replaced with 25% RHA being the optimum value from previous research. Water was magnetized by a magnetic device fabricated by the research team and level of magnetization was determined using magnetic field sensor application. The chemical composition of RHA shows that it contained 89.42% of oxides to be used as a pozzolan. Magnetization reduced total dissolved solid, total soluble solid, chloride content and surface tension while pH increased. The workability of magnetized and normal water concrete samples was determined. It was magnetized water concrete samples that gave higher workability than normal water concrete. Compressive, Flexural and Split tensile strengths of magnetized and normal water concrete were determined at 7, 14, 28 and 56 days of curing by immersion in portable water. Magnetization shown higher influence on early strengths of concrete. Compressive, Flexural and Split tensile strengths of concrete improved between 13.25%-18.63%, 14.83%-18.02% and 9.80%-31.63%, respectively when magnetized water was introduced during concrete production. STATA package was used to analysis the data. The descriptive statistics show that mean, standard deviation error and standard deviation for concrete produced with magnetized water were all higher than that of concrete produced with normal water for all properties tested. However, inferential statistics show that there is no significant difference in the mean compressive, flexural and tensile strengths of concrete produced with magnetized water and normal water since P-value obtained was higher than the error margin of 0.05(P>0.05) for all the tested properties of concrete.