Mohd Zailan Sulieman

Durability Performance of Oil Palm Shell Lightweight Concrete as Insulation Concrete

This paper presents a solid agricultural solid waste, namely oil palm shell (OPS) as coarse aggregate to produce insulation concrete. This study will investigate the porosity, air permeability and thermal conductivity of OPS lightweight concrete (OPSLC). Nine mix designs were developed which comprised three OPS shapes and three volume fractions of OPS. The results indicated that increased volume fraction of OPS caused decreased durability performance and thermal conductivity. The shape of OPS is found to have significant effects to the porosity content and air permeability values. Thus, there is a strong relationship between porosity content and air permeability for all specimens. Based on the results, all specimens are found to be in the range of insulation concrete category except for specimen C-30, which has more than 0.75W/mK thermal conductivity according to RILEM requirement. The thermal conductivity of OPSLC is comparable with artificial lightweight aggregate.