Performance of lightweight concrete using available Nano-Silica

Abstract

Lightweight concrete has been used in Europe and America from the long time when the Middle East still uses the Normal concrete for the construction. Structural lightweight concrete provides a lot of resources either by providing more constructions with the same financial cost of the normal concrete with fewer constructions or by providing resources as reinforced steel, for example. The main objective of this research that is studying the structural lightweight concrete and studying the effect of adding nano-silica to the lightweight concrete. There are few researches in the field of using nano-silica with lightweight concrete. In this study, much of the experiments have been conducted in terms of hardness and durability to obtain an ideal lightweight aggregate concrete with the ideal nano-silica ratio through three phases. The first stage includes the choice of the suitable locally available lightweight aggregates. At the second phase, after choosing the ideal mixture, nano-silica effect will be studied on concrete by