Sustainable development: Using stone dust to replace a part of sand in concrete mixture

Lecturer in Civil Engineering Department, Tadulako University Palu, Indonesia.

^* Corresponding author: turuallo@yahoo.co.uk

Abstract

Stone dust is a waste material produced in stone crusher industry. Stone dust produced from the crushed stone industry is quite numerous. PT Mega Beton Jaya is a stone crushed industry, which is located in Buluri, Palu, has difficulty in providing a location to accommodate the waste of stone dust. In addition, the community around this industry is quite worried with the waste ash as the air around the industry contaminated with the stone ash. This study aims to find out the maximum percentage of stone dust to substitute sand in a concrete mix to obtain the maximum strength and good workability. The cement used throughout this work was Portland cement composite (PCC) produced by PT Semen Tonasa, the sand was taken from Palu river, while the stone dust and coarse aggregate were taken from PT Mega Beton Jaya stone crushed industry. The percentages of stone dust replacing sand were varied from 0, 20, 30, 40, 60, 80 and 100% to find out the maximum percentage of stone dust to replace sand from river to produce the maximum compressive strength of concrete. The results of this research showed that the maximum percentage of stone dust, which could replace river sand in concrete mixture was 40% with the strength 15% higher than that of concrete with natural sand only. The higher the percentages of stone dust, which were used to replace a part of sand in concrete mixtures resulted the lower slump of concrete. In addition, the replacing natural sand with stone dust higher than 20% produced the value of slump for both normal and high strength concretes lower than those concretes with natural sand only.