Abstract

The use of supplementary cementitious material is gaining much attention owing to its high pozzolanic property and further improvement in strength properties. Silica-fume is one among the widely used pozzolanic material which exhibits high cementing efficiency due to high silica content. This study presents comprehends a detailed insight on the hydration properties of silica fume with cement. Silica fume consists of very fine particle size and contains silica content more than 90%. The cement hydration results in the formation of calcium hydroxide and this is consumed with the addition of silica fume and results in additional calcium silicate hydrate. This compound primarily envisages the strength and improved microstructure of concrete. Addition of silica-fume fills in the spaces between cement grains. The test results showed that higher compressive strength of concrete is obtained by using 8.0% of silica-fume at 7 and 28 days was 48.25 and 55.83 MPa, respectively. This phenomenon is frequently referred to as particle packing or micro-filling. Even if silica fume did not react chemically, the micro-filler effect would lead to significant improvements in the microstructure of concrete. A comprehensive review has been carried out in this study to give a good understanding on the advantages of pozzolanic properties of silica fume in cement concrete.

Keywords:

Microfillers, setting properties, silica-fume, strength and ultrasonic pulse velocity, superplasticizer,

References

Competing interests

The authors have no competing interests.

Open Access Policy

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.

Copyright

The authors have no competing interests.