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Electric Behavior Modeling and Evaluation of New Lightweight Conductive Concrete
Swaked, Bassam Emad
Swaked, Bassam Emad
Date
2016-11
Author
Advisor
Type
Thesis
Degree
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Description
A Master of Science thesis in Electrical Engineering by Bassam Emad Swaked entitled, "Electric Behavior Modeling and Evaluation of New Lightweight Conductive Concrete," submitted in November 2016. Thesis advisor is Dr. Nasser Qaddoumi and thesis co-advisor is Dr. Sherif Yehia. Soft and hard copy available.
Abstract
Concrete mixtures consist of several ingredients such as cement, fine and coarse aggregates, water, and if needed supplementary materials, such as fly ash, silica fume and ground-granulated blast-furnace slag. Such concrete mixtures, considered as conventional concrete, have high electrical resistivity. The addition of electrically conductive admixtures, such as carbon powder and steel fiber, produces conductive concrete mixtures that exhibit improved conductivity for specific applications. Moreover, different types of aggregates can be used to produce concrete mixtures for various applications. Lightweight Aggregate (LWA) has been studied in recent works and has promising applications in the field of civil engineering. It is essential; however, to have a complete analysis of the physical and mechanical properties of any concrete mixture in order to properly evaluate its performance in any intended application. The research efforts, previously conducted on concrete mixtures utilizing LWA, have been focused on the study of the mechanical properties of these mixtures with relation to proportions of other additives. This research focuses on the evaluation of the electrical properties of lightweight conductive concrete mixtures with different constituents. The main objective of the presented investigation is to study the behavior of concrete mixtures containing LWA and the development of an electrical model that can be used to simulate the performance of these mixtures in intended applications. Impedance spectroscopy is utilized to conduct a thorough analysis of the electrical impedance of selected mixtures. The effects of the supplementary and the conductive additives on the impedance of the produced concrete are also studied. These materials are found to change the shapes of the impedance spectra. This is related to their effects on the distributed pores in the mixture.