Investigation into waste tire rubber-filled concrete

Over the years, there has been mounting interest in the use of recycled tire rubbers in highway construction. Tire rubber-filled concrete, a rubberized Portland cement concrete with a portion of aggregates replaced by tire rubber particles, represents an alternative of using recycled tire rubbers. It is found that rubberized concrete has very high toughness. However, its strength decreases significantly as the rubber content increases. This limits its application to secondary structural components only. Very little progress has been made in increasing the strength of rubberized concrete due to the lack of understanding of the toughing mechanism. In this study, rubberized concrete was treated as a multiphase particulate-filled composite material. A modified three-layer built-in composite model was proposed based on a previous study on ordinary concrete. Finite element analysis was conducted on the developed composite model. Cylindrical rubberized concrete samples and ordinary concrete samples were prepared and tested to provide basic physical/mechanical properties in the analysis. The effect of various design parameters on the composite strength was evaluated. The finite element analysis validated the test results.