Design of self-compacting concrete with fly ash

Concrete of a desired strength for any specific application can be obtained by using any of the accepted methods of design. However, the addition of mineral admixtures, such as fly ash, in concrete, requires a systematic design procedure for obtaining the required strength. It is possible to design a fly ash concrete of the required strength through the ‘efficiency concept', and the same is also true for the design of self-compacting concrete (SCC). In this paper, a new mix design methodology is proposed for proportioning of self-compacting fly ash concretes based on the efficiency concept. The methodology has already been successfully verified through a proper experimental investigation and the self-compacting fly ash concretes were evaluated for their self compactability and strength characteristics. The results indicate that the proposed method is capable of producing high-quality SCC.