Properties of self-compacting concretes made with binary, ternary, and quaternary cementitious blends of fly ash, blast furnace slag, and silica fume

Self-compacting concretes (SCCs) have brought a promising insight into the concrete industry to provide environmental impact and cost reduction. However, the use of ternary and especially quaternary cementitious blends of mineral admixtures have not found sufficient applications in the production of SCCs. For this purpose, an experimental study was conducted to investigate properties of SCCs with mineral admixtures. Moreover, durability based multi-objective optimization of the mixtures were performed to achieve an optimal concrete mixture proportioning. A total of 22 concrete mixtures were designed having a constant water/binder ratio of 0.44 and a total binder content of 450 kg/m3. The control mixture included only a Portland cement (PC) as the binder while the remaining mixtures incorporated binary, ternary, and quaternary cementitious blends of PC, fly ash (FA), ground granulated blast furnace slag (S), and silica fume (SF). Fresh properties of the SCCs were tested for slump flow diameter, slump flow time, L-box height ratio, and V-funnel flow time. Furthermore, the hardened properties of the concretes were tested for sorptivity, water permeability, chloride permeability, electrical resistivity, drying shrinkage, compressive strength, and ultrasonic pulse velocity. The results indicated that when the durability properties of the concretes were taken into account, the ternary use of S and SF provided the best performance.