Cement manufacturing process releases a significant amount of CO2 emissions, a major factor in the greenhouse effect and warming of the earth planet. This led to the search for more environmentally appropriate alternative to cement. Effective alternatives are the use of blastfurnace steel slag or the production of slag geopolymer composites. Although blastfurnace steel slag in geopolymer offers high compressive strength and durability, it provides low flexural and tensile strength hence, steel fibers are added to solve these problems.
This study investigates the effect of adding steel fibers with different ratios (0.5, 1, 2, and 3%) by weight as a reinforcing to slag-based geopolymer composites activated by an alkaline solution of 6% sodium hydroxide. Mechanical properties, water/binder ratio, and compressive strength are reported. Several techniques have been utilized to identify the resulting geopolymer phases and structural such as X-ray diffraction and Fourier transform infrared spectra.
The results demonstrated that the produced geopolymer composites characterization is almost stable by adding various percentages of steel fiber up to 2% followed by a step decrease thus, leads to enhanced mechanical strength, shrinkage, water absorption, crack propagation, and post-cracking.