Experimental Study on Concrete by Partial Replacement of Cement by Cow Dung Ash (CDA)

It is a known fact that concrete is the best adopted material for any type of building and reinforced construction. This may be due to the advantageous properties of concrete as it has good strength, thermal resistance and cost effectiveness. For obtaining such properties, a sound concrete must be ensured by using a proper materials such as cement, fine aggregate and coarse aggregate with appropriate amount of water content. The use of cement has been increased as there is growth of population, industrialization and infrastructure. The production of cement also requires huge amount of energy and causes pollution. Many alternate materials are partially replaced by cement so as to avoid energy consumption and pollution. The alternate materials may include fly ash, cow dung ash, rice husk ash, coconut shell powder etc.…which may requires less energy for its production. Cow dung ash is the naturally available material and is of less cost. As our India is a farming country and lot of farmers depends on agriculture it is easily and cheaply available material. It also has thermal resisting, binding and other properties nearly familiar to cement. This project is done to dig out the properties of concrete by adding cow dung ash in various percentages such as 2%, 4%, 6%, 7%, 8%, 9% and 10% and tests like consistency, initial setting time, final setting time, specific gravity, workability and compressive strength are conducted. The obtained results are compared to properties of normal concrete values. The addition of cow dung ash will have an impact on strength properties of concrete up to certain limit. The strength may increase and suddenly drops when there is decrease in cement amount got replaced by cow dung ash. The main aim of this project is to estimate the optimum percentage of cow dung ash that has to be replaced for obtaining required strength.