Civil Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

3-12-2018

Abstract

The object of this study is to investigate the feasibility of ball-milled graphene oxide nanoflakes (GONFs) produced by a mechanochemical process as an additive in Ordinary Portland Cement (OPC)-based paste and concrete. Different percentages of GONFs (0.01–1 wt. %) were added in OPC paste mix to find the optimum content of GONF in GONF-combined cement composites. To investigate the effect of the changes in the mix design on OPC paste, two mix design methods were employed: (1) Dry-mix, where GONFs and OPC powders are mixed prior to paste formation and (2) Wet-mix, where sonicated GONFs solution is used as the pour water with OPC paste mix. Data from mechanical tests (compressive and flexural tests) showed that OPC paste incorporating 0.05% GONF resulted in the highest strength for OPC paste. The results of strength tests indicated that Dry-mix is competitive as compared with Wet-mix. Scanning electron microscope (SEM) and energy dispersive spectroscopy (EDS) was used to identify GONFs inside products of cement hydration. To explore the practicality of using GONF in concrete, concrete specimens were made, cured and tested with different percentages of dry-mixed GONFs (0.01–0.1 wt. %). The result of strength test showed that GONF improves the compressive and flexural strengths of concrete around 15% with 0.01 wt. % GONF.

Comments

© 2018 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Publication Title

Applied Sciences

DOI

10.3390/app8030419

Share

COinS
 
 

To view the content in your browser, please download Adobe Reader or, alternately,
you may Download the file to your hard drive.

NOTE: The latest versions of Adobe Reader do not support viewing PDF files within Firefox on Mac OS and if you are using a modern (Intel) Mac, there is no official plugin for viewing PDF files within the browser window.