Enhancing Bituminous Mix Performance with Waste-Treated Bricks as Aggregate Partial Replacement: A Comprehensive Evaluation

In the North-Eastern part of India, crushed river bed aggregate (i.e., marginal aggregate) is abundantly available instead of other conventional aggregates to build the road. Alongside, waste bricks (i.e., marginal material) are also available sufficiently which are commenced from construction and demolition waste. In spite of their poor quality, both marginal materials have been utilized to prepare bituminous mixes in this study. Therefore, an evaluation on performance study has been done on bituminous concrete (BC) grade II with untreated and treated bricks as partial replacement of aggregate. Although, the major concern of waste brick is its water absorption. Thus, bricks are treated with white cement (WC), Portland pozzolana cement (PPC), and Sodium Silicate (SS). After treatment, water absorption is reduced by 40%, 2.33%, and 48%, respectively. Marshall test has been performed on 13 combinations of bituminous mixes to determine optimum binder content (OBC) after partial substitution of coarse aggregates with untreated and treated bricks at 5%, 10%, 15%, and 20% respectively. Several mechanical performance tests like Indirect Tensile Strength (ITS), Tensile Strength Ratio (TSR), and Static creep tests are performed on mixes. Results shows that the optimum replacement percentage of bricks is evaluated as 5% for untreated bricks (NB5) and 10% for treated bricks (WC10 and SS10). Thereafter, texture depth, permeability, and Cantabro tests, are performed on those optimized mixes. Based on all performance tests, mix replaced with sodium silicate treated bricks at 10% (SS10) gives better performance among other bituminous mixes.