Application of Waste Sands for Making Industrial Floors

Concrete is the most commonly known composite material used in civil engineering, thus concrete production influences significantly the natural environment especially in developing countries. The main component of cement composite is aggregate which covers from 60% to 80% of cement composite volume. Global annual production of concrete, mortar and other cement based composites consumes 20 billion tonne of different aggregate. It means that about 3 tonne of aggregate is used per person per year. The production of ordinary concrete usually consumes coarse aggregate (e.g. gravel) and fine aggregate (e.g. sand) in weight proportion approximately equal to 3:1. If the weight proportion of the occurring of coarse aggregate and fine aggregate in a specific geographical region were close to 3:1, then the production of cement composites would be entirely balanced and would be carried out without any aggregate waste. Unfortunately, natural resources of coarse and fine aggregates can be found in very different weight proportions. For example, natural aggregates in Pomerania region in Poland are of glacial origin and they occur in a form of sands and all-in-aggregates. Production of ordinary concrete based on such, locally available fine aggregate is hindered. High transport costs of coarse aggregate from distant pit deposits (often over 200km) to the production facility, force producers to use the process of hydroclassification of natural all-in-aggregate in order to receive coarse aggregate. Approximately half of documented deposits of aggregate in the Pomerania region is constituted by deposits hydroclassified during the exploitation. Process of hydroclassification allows to divide all-in-aggregate into coarse aggregate and fine aggregate. Waste fine aggregate is a by-product of hydroclassification process. Because of a huge deficit of coarse aggregate in the region, coarse aggregate obtained during hydroclassification of all-in-aggregate is constantly being sold and always on demand enlarging heaps of waste sand. In the paper an issue of waste sand utilization was raised. Various civil engineering applications of waste fine aggregate cement composites have proved that meticulously made fine aggregate cement composite is characterized by satisfactory strength and durability in order to be applied in civil engineering as a standard construction material. One of examples how to resolve the waste sand utilization problem could be its application for the production of steel fiber reinforced mineral composites used for industrial floors. The authors introduced their tests results based on selected properties of fine aggregate fibrous composites with different amounts of steel fiber. The study is a small part of a broad research program.