MICROSTRUCTURE CHARACTERISTIC AND COMPRESSIVE STRENGTH OF SELF COMPACTING CONCRETE USING SEA WATER AS MIXING WATER
Indonesia is an archipelagic country which makes many areas doesn’t have qualified water as drinking water. As concrete construction building in the region has possibly minimum or non-existent amount of fresh water, the using of sea water in mixing concrete and curing concrete is unavoidable. The demand of water is getting more and more increasing in both the improvement of infrastructure development and the life need. In the concrete industry, several billion tons of water is used as water mixing, curing and cleaning every year. Therefore the use of sea water is not allowed. In fact, we know that seawater is one of the abundant natural resources. Due to this problem, the research on the use of sea water is very important owing to the saving of freshwater is seriously needed. This study uses sea water by combining effective and efficient concrete technology of Self Compacting Concrete (SCC). This paper is a part of ongoing research studying about microstructure characteristics and the strength of SCC using sea water. It discusses about the compressive strength, absorption and porosity as microstructure characteristics of SCC until the age of 28 days. The results are: (1) the seawater used as mixing water did not affect the development of the compressive strength of concrete, (2) the difference compressive strength of SCC-SS with SCC-FF at an early age is very high occurred at ages 1 and 3 days and (3) The higher the compressive strength value is, the smaller the absorption and porosity is in concrete.