Laboratory investigations on porous concrete drainage systems performance

Abstract

This research aimed to determine the performance of porous concrete drainage systems, which is focussing on porous concrete permeability and compressive strength. The laboratory investigations have been successfully conducted following appropriate standards and concerned to research for drain cover and cube sample tests with different porous concrete aggregate sizes of 8 and 16 mm. Meanwhile, the porous concrete performance of 4 and 12 mm aggregate sizes have been estimated based on linear regression analysis of 8 and 16 mm for cube sample and drain cover sample, respectively. The finding shows that the highest permeability rate for both cube (20.71 mm/s) and cover drain (8.11 mm/s) samples of 16 mm aggregate size with the highest porosity as compared to other aggregates sizes. The permeability and the porosity of porous concrete increase with the increase of aggregate size. However, the compressive strength decreases as the aggregate size increases, where the compressive strength for 8 mm aggregate size is 3.87 MPa higher than compressive strength for 16 mm aggregate size (3.28 MPa). Thus, the aggregate with a bigger size is good in terms of porous and permeability but low in terms of compressive strength.