Experimental Study on Strength Characteristics of Self-Compacted Concrete with Polyethylene Glycol as a Self Curing Agent

With growing population, industrialization, and urbanization, there is corresponding growth in the demand for infrastructure. Insufficient compaction dramatically lowers ultimate performance of concrete in spite of good mix design. Placing the fresh concrete requires skilled operatives using slow, heavy, noisy, expensive, energy-consuming and often dangerous mechanical vibration to ensure adequate compaction to obtain the full strength of the hardened concrete. Self-compacting concrete (SCC) is an innovative concrete that does not requires vibration for placing and compaction. The performance of concrete depends on method of curing also. In conventional curing spraying of water/ keeping under wet condition is followed. A new technique called Self Curing (SC) which provides additional moisture in concrete for more effective hydration of cement. An attempt has been made to study the strength characteristics of M20 grade concrete by partially replacing cement with polyethylene glycol as self-curing agent in percentages of 0.5 to 2.