Bottom ash as a solid waste of the palm oil industry turned into a high-value cement replacement for sustainable cement-based materials

Bottom ash needs a pre-treatment process to produce the finer particles until it is like cement material and has a good reactivity as pozzolanic material. This research investigates the effect of using bottom ash on the durability performance of concrete. The modified process was applied to bottom ash to produce finer particles that can improve the durability performances of concrete. The concrete used in this study is self-compacting concrete (SCC) due to its convenience. The bottom ash was pretreated by mechanical grinding before being used as supplementary cement materials (SCM), later called ground bottom ash, and applied from 10% to 50% as the partial replacement by the weight of cement. BA30 showed the highest compressive strength with an increasing percentage of 32% and had a similar value to BA0. The porosity of all mixtures was under 15%. The water absorption of all mixtures was under 10%. BA10, BA20, and BA30 reduced the permeability of the SCC, while BA50 increased the permeability of the SCC. BA30 had the lowest value of RCPT as 916.22 C. The results show that bottom ash positively affects the durability performance of SCC and can be used as an SCM to produce more sustainable cement-based construction materials.