COMPARATIVE STUDY ON FLEXURAL BEHAVIOUR OF LIGHTWEIGHT AGGREGATE RC BEAMS

In this developing environment, the increasing cost of construction tools are raising day by day is the factor of great concern. In concrete production, aggregate is the less costly material as compared to cement and maximum economy is obtained by using as much aggregate as possible. The coarse aggregates are the foundation of concrete. In this paper, the performance of lightweight aggregate concrete (LWAC) beam under two-point bending system is discussed and comparative studies were made with normal weight concrete (NWC) beam. The light weight aggregates (pumice and palm oil shell) are incorporated into the concrete, separately as a direct replacement for coarse aggregate at 10% and 50% replacement level. The properties such as compressive strength, flexural strength, crack pattern, ductility index and rebound hammer test load are studied by casting and testing around 40 samples consisting of 30 numbers of plain cube specimens of size 150×150×150 mm and 10 numbers of RC beams of sizes 150×150×1000 mm and 150×300×1000 mm for testing after 28 days of wet concrete curing. From the experimental results, it was observed that POS concrete has sufficient strength than Pumice aggregate, therefore POS is to be known as structural lightweight concrete and that the movement of behavior of LWAC and NWC is very similar.