Roller-Compacted Sand-Based Concrete for Road Coating - Experimentation and Statistics

It is widely admitted that constructions today require a parsimonious and intelligent use of materials, which must be respectful of the environment, in addition to innovative ideas. Over the past few years, the rapid development of road infrastructure and the lack of gravel resources have pushed practitioners in the field to develop and propose new alternative materials for road construction. As these novel materials are essentially based on sand, an innovative technique, i.e. the roller-compacted sand concrete technique, has lately been developed. The present paper aims primarily to investigate the effects of the physical characteristics and the mineralogical nature of sand on the mechanical and physical behavior of this new roller-compacted sand-based concrete.For this purpose, it was deemed appropriate to choose the design-of-experiment (mixture design) modeling with three factors that are represented by three different types of sand, i.e. calcareous sand (CS), alluvial sand (AS), and desert sand (DS). In addition, it was decided to select the compressive and tensile strength, dynamic modulus of elasticity, and water absorption at 28 days, as responses. Next, a microstructural analysis was carried out using the scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and X-ray diffraction (XRD) techniques.The results obtained showed that the introduction of the mixture (0.45DS + 0.45CS + 0.1AS) into the roller-compacted sand concrete gives it the best mechanical and physical performance. It turned out that this is due to the improvement of the granular compactness and to the good homogenization of the roller-compacted sand-based concrete obtained.On the other hand, some mechanical tests were carried out in order to characterize the mixture of the roller-compacted sand-based concrete and the results obtained proved to be quite satisfactory. These findings allowed validating the use of this material in road structures.Moreover, these results attest to the technical-scientific durability of using the roller-compacted sand concrete incorporating desert sand (DS) as an efficient material for road construction.