Manufacturing and Testing of Light-Weight Foamed Concrete: Experimental Results

With human existence, a tremendous number of materials and engineering materials were developed to match the continually changing human needs. Therefore, Lightweight foamed concrete (LFC) materials were fabricated and tested experimentally using locally available feedstock materials to accommodate these changes. This was done at the University of Jordan’s labs at the School of Engineering. The samples were made by varying the percentages of foam and accelerator. The foam used locally was the STAR foam while the calcium chloride. The samples were first machined into cylinders then tested in the School of Engineering Labs for strength, thermal conductivity and absorption. Later on, modeling and optimization of the experiment data was conducted. It was found that certain samples showed good machinability during forming. Some samples showed excellent behavior from stress point of view, others were good in thermal conductivity and some other samples were good in absorption behavior. Further, no single sample or mixture properties gave the best results.