Mixture design method of self-compacting lightweight aggregate concrete based on rheological property and strength of mortar

Abstract Self-compacting lightweight aggregate concrete (SCLC) is a kind of high performance concrete developed by combining the favourable properties of self-compacting concrete (SCC) and lightweight concrete (LWC). However, due to the lack of a mixture design method, its application in civil engineering is limited. Based on this, a new mixture design method taking the mortar film thickness as the key technical index was proposed. In this method, the mixture design procedure was divided into a self-compacting performance design based on the rheology of mortar and a strength design based on the effective water-cement ratio rule of mortar. By correlating the relationship between the workability and mortar rheological parameters and between strength and corresponding mortar strength, the mortar rheology and strength could be used to predict SCLC workability and strength. To verify the feasibility of this method, the self-compacting performance was designed by taking SCLC-1.8-0.35 as an example, and the strength was predicted by taking SCLC-1.8-0.3, SCLC-1.8-0.4 and related cases in the published literature as examples. This result indicated that this new design method could use the rheology and strength of mortar to predict the workability and strength of SCLC.