Effect of copper slag as a fine aggregate on the properties of cement mortars and concrete

Corrosion and leaching studies in blended copper slag mortar

“…Al-Jabri et al [18][19][20] reported that copper slag can be used as a sand replacement material for up to 40% and they have also tried the effect of copper slag along with silica fume for making high performance with good strength and durability properties. Shi et al [21] studied the utilization of copper slag in cement and concrete.…”

Mechanical Properties and Durability of Concrete with Water Cooled Copper Slag Aggregate

“…Other researchers (e.g. Al-Jabri et al [20] using a w/c = 0.5) also found an initially lower water absorption (in [20] this occurred for up to 40% CS content), which gradually increased above that of the control mix for higher copper slag percentages. It is possible that the increase in water absorption, which was observed mostly in the w/c = 0.55 mixes was due to some excess water (the copper slag particles having a lower surface water absorption than sand); this could lead to a higher porosity and could explain both the higher absorption and Figure 7 represents the accelerated corrosion test results in terms of mass loss of the embedded steel reinforcement bars.…”

“…Generally it was found that copper slag may increase workability of concrete mixes (e.g. [17][18][19][20]31]) but most of these papers used superplasticizers to enhance workability of high strength concrete mixes; also in one paper [26] the slump was found to slightly increase with copper slag percentage but overall it remained very low despite the fairly high water/cement ratio (w/c = 0.48). No measured data of moduli of elasticity were found in the literature, except in a Japanese paper as reported by [2].…”

“…It was also noticed that in many papers the type of slag used was not explicitly mentioned (e.g. [17][18][19][20][21][22]) but that overall the air-cooled slag appears to be the type of slag used in most publications; this is either mentioned explicitly (e.g. [6,[23][24][25]-the latter paper uses both air cooled and water cooled slag for the partial replacement of coarse and fine aggregate respectively-) or can be inferred based on the supplier's details and material characteristics (e.g.…”

“…Namely Kharade et al [26] describing the industrial process producing copper slag, (without specifying that this was the process followed by their slag supplier), mentioned that slag 'is transported to a water basin with a low temperature for solidification' (note however that Poovizhi and Khatirvel [24] using slag from the same supplier mentioned this explicitly to be air-cooled). The slag used in Al-Jabri et al's publications [17][18][19][20] was possibly water-cooled based on information found directly from the suppliers' current website (assuming that the current industrial processes described on the website were the same at the time of Al Jabri et al's research). Some papers used copper tailings to replace sand aggregate [27,28]; these are not directly comparable to the water-cooled aggregate used in the present study.…”