Experimental Investigation of the Effect of Manufactured Sand and Lightweight Sand on the Properties of Fresh and Hardened Self-Compacting Lightweight Concretes

Self-compacting lightweight concrete (SCLC) is a promising construction material for building applications, but most SCLCs today are made with river sand (RS). There is an increasing demand for environmental protection, as well as materials with a high strength/density ratio. The manufactured sand (MS) and lightweight sand (LS) as fine aggregates in cement-based composite materials have been receiving more attention among researchers. However, there is not much information about the effects of MS and LS on the properties of the fresh and hardened SCLCs. In this paper, the properties of fresh and hardened SCLC made with MS and LS were investigated by a series of experiments. SCLCs made with RS served as the control in this study. The test results show that increasing the sand ratio (from 0.40–0.50) decreased the filling ability and led to an increased T(50) time, which is the time spent for the concrete to reach the 500 mm spread circle, for all of the fresh SCLCs. Although the passing ability of MS-SCLCs and LS-SCLCs is not as good as RS-SCLCs, their results are still within an acceptable range. The ratio of mechanical properties to density was found to increase with an increase of the sand ratio for all of the hardened SCLCs. MS-SCLCs presented the highest compressive strength among all of the SCLCs studied. Although the mean compressive strength of LS-SCLCs is lower than those of the other two SCLCs by 8%, their strength to density ratio is higher than others by 15%, and the ratio increases remarkably with the increase of the sand ratio. Permeability test results showed that the permeability coefficient of MS-SCLC is remarkably lower than that of LS-SCLC, but slightly higher than that of RS-SCLC.