Experimental & computational study on fly ash and kaolin based synthetic lightweight aggregate

The objective of this study is to manufacture environmentally-friendly synthetic lightweight aggregates that may be used in the structural lightweight concrete production. The cold-bonding pelletization process has been used in the agglomeration of the pozzolanic materials to achieve these synthetic lightweight aggregates. In this context, it was aimed to recycle the waste fly ash by employing it in the manufacturing process as the major cementitious component. According to the well-known facts reported in the literature, it is stated that the main disadvantage of the synthetic lightweight aggregate produced by applying the cold-bonding pelletization technique to the pozzolanic materials is that it has a lower strength in comparison with the natural aggregate. Therefore, in this study, the metakaolin made of high purity kaolin and calcined kaolin obtained from impure kaolin have been employed at particular contents in the synthetic lightweight aggregate manufacturing as a cementitious material to enhance the particle crushing strength. Additionally, to propose a curing condition for practical attempts, different curing conditions were designated and their influences on the characteristics of the synthetic lightweight aggregates were investigated. Three substantial features of the aggregates, specific gravity, water absorption capacity, and particle crushing strength, were measured at the end of 28-day adopted curing conditions. Observed that the incorporation of thermally treated kaolin significantly influenced the crushing strength and water absorption of the aggregates. The statistical evaluation indicated that the investigated properties of the synthetic lightweight aggregate were affected by the thermally treated kaolin content more than the kaoline type and curing regime. Utilizing the thermally treated kaolin in the synthetic aggregate manufacturing lead to a more than 40% increase in the crushing strength of the pellets in all curing regimes. Moreover, two numerical formulations having high estimation capacity have been developed to predict the crushing strength of such types of aggregates by using softcomputing techniques: gene expression programming and artificial neural networks. The R-squared values, indicating the estimation performance of the models, of approximately 0.97 and 0.98 were achieved for the numerical formulations generated by using gene expression programming and artificial neural networks techniques, respectively.