Review on the utilization of palm ash for geopolymer composite

Abstract

The waste materials from agro industry can be use as pozzolanic material in concrete production. One of the agro waste materials that have possibility is palm ash because it has been used up to 60% for cement replacement. The palm ash that has been collected from palm mill need to be dried at temperature 105 ± 5ºC for 24 hours and sieved through 300 μm sieve to removed coarse particles. Besides that, the fineness of the palm ash influences the compressive strength of the concrete. Generally, the palm ash was ground using ball mill to obtained more fine particles. For the geopolymer concrete, the use of palm ash as the only pozzolanic material resulted in low compressive strength. This is because palm ash only rich silicon oxide (SiO2) but lower content of alumina. As such, in order to obtained higher compressive strength, other pozzolanic material such as metakaolin or fly ash were required. By increasing ratio of fly ash or metakaolin to palm ash increased the compressive strength of geopolymer.