Fresh and hardened properties of lightweight foamed concrete with palm oil fuel ash as filler

Incorporation of pozzolans can give useful enhancements to the concrete properties. This paper aims to study the effects of palm oil fuel ash (POFA) on engineering properties of lightweight foamed concrete (LFC) with 1300 ± 50 kg/m3 of density in terms of compressive, splitting tensile and flexural strengths, compressive toughness, and thermal conductivity. Three types of LFC were prepared, namely (i) LFC with 100% sand filler as control mix (LFC-CM), (ii) LFC with 10% POFA replacement as a part of filler (LFC-PF10) and (iii) LFC with 20% POFA replacement as a part of filler (LFC-PF20). All specimens were under water curing condition. It was observed that the incorporation POFA into foamed concrete as a part of filler for LFC-PF10 and LFC-PF20 has enhanced their compressive strength, flexural and splitting tensile strengths, ductility as well as compressive toughness. Besides, the thermal conductivity of POFA based LFC specimens were slightly increased compared to that of control LFC specimens. It is demonstrated that lightweight foamed concretes with certain percentage of POFA replacement filler (LFC-PF10 and LFC-PF20) obtained better strengths performance compared to the controlled specimens (LFC-CM) with solely sand filler.