Flexural behaviour of steel fibre reinforced concrete beams made with copper slag as partial fine aggregate replacement

Lately, development of concrete using industrial byproducts has garnered major significance in the construction industry in order to overcome problems associated with depleted natural resources. As, river sand is costly and also large scale exhaustion of these sources generates environmental harms, a substitute or replacement product for concrete industry is very indispensable. In such a situation, the copper slag can be proposed as an alternative to the river sand, which is an industrial by-product obtained from the manufacturing of copper. The present investigation assesses the incorporation of copper slag in concrete (CSC). In this paper, experimental investigations are carried to understand the flexural characteristics such as such as first crack, ultimate load carrying capacity, maximum crack width and deflection at service load and at centre of steel fibred copper slag mixed under-reinforced concrete beams. Results showed that the compressive strength of concrete decreases as copper slag content increases beyond 40%. The reduction in compressive strength beyond 40% replacement of river sand due to the increase in free water content in concrete mixes due to the low absorption properties of copper slag which can cause excessive bleeding at higher copper slag content. The load-deflection behaviour of under-reinforced, normal and copper slag concrete beams is witnessed to be alike apart from the increased values of ultimate failure loads and ultimate deflections at failure in steel fibred copper slag concrete beams.