Effects of Salinity on Concrete Characteristics

Abstract

The worldwide population is growing at an exponential rate, and with it, the need for concrete to build and maintain infrastructure. This has led to a variety of environmental problems. The demand for drinkable water has skyrocketed as a result of this. In order to make dry-area concrete production less harmful to the environment, this study investigates the potential of substituting highly mineralized treated effluent for potable water. We contrasted concrete specimens mixed with distilled water (DW) and those mixed with saline treated wastewater (saline-TWW) to ensure they performed according to the guidelines for water mixing. The results demonstrated that the saline TWW concrete mixes had higher early strength and equivalent long-term strength to the control mix prepared with DW. Also, the new concrete mixture's workability was unaffected by the addition of saline-TWW, while the curing time of the cement paste was prolonged. To further assess the microstructural characteristics of the hardened concrete, testing for water permeability, scanning electron microscopy (SEM), and X-ray diffraction were used. The results demonstrated that saline-TWW concrete outlasted DW concrete in terms of durability due to its more compacted microstructure and smaller pore sizes. Also, to find out how much corrosion there was, samples of reinforced mortar constructed with saline-TWW and DW were electrochemically tested.
Electrochemical testing revealed that concrete mixed with completely saline-TWW significantly increased the rate of corrosion of the embedded steel.