Mechanical properties and flexural behaviour of reinforced concrete beams containing recycled concrete aggregate

Increasing waste recycling has become an essential process in the construction industry due to the environmental and economic advantages, such as minimizing waste in landfills, saving natural resources, and decreasing pollution. Crushing and sieving waste from standard compression test cubes is used to produce the recycled concrete aggregate (RCA). A set of standard concrete cylinders, cubes, and beam specimens were made by utilizing coarse aggregate replacement ratios of 0%, 30%, 50% and 70%. At the day 28 stage, the specimens were tested to determine compressive strength, stress–strain relationship, splitting tensile strength, and flexural strength. In addition, four reinforced concrete (RC) beams were cast and tested under a four-point load to evaluate the flexural behaviour of RC beams with partial replacement of the natural aggregate with RCA. One was a natural aggregate (NA) control beam, while the others had varying RCA ratios (30%, 50% and 70%). The results show that the compressive strength of RCA concrete with the replacement by 30%, 50% and 70% decreased by 9.10%, 18.88% and 22.57% respectively, in comparison to the compressive strength of normal concrete (NC). The RCA concrete showed a high strain capacity, which indicated high ductility. The maximum RCA type strains ranged from 0.0056 to 0.0072. Concrete flexural strength showed a slight decrease in comparison to NC (18.83% decrease), where the tensile strength showed a 10.61% decrease in comparison to NC. As for RC beams, the load-carrying capacity decreased by 10.5% with increases in the replacement ratio.