AN EXPERIMENTAL STUDY ON STRENGTH AND DURABILITY PROPERTIES OF BACTERIAL CONCRETE

Concrete is the worldwide accepted construction material for its adverse strength and durability properties. It has very high compressive strength and very weak in tension, because of which reinforcement is used in concrete to take the tension. As the concrete is brittle, it always results in the formation of cracks in the tension zones upon loading and leads to the durability issues by decreasing the life time of the structures. To counter such durability problems conventional repair methods like crack filling with epoxy injections and use of additional reinforcement for decreasing the crack width were in practice which involves a lot of economy. This lead to the development of self-healing concrete concept using some bacteria mixing in the concrete and the crack developed will be self-healed by bacteria as a result of reproduction of the bacteria. In the present work, it was investigated to identify the strength and durability properties of the M30 grade concrete by mixing bacteria named Bacillus Subtilis as at varying percentages like 5ml, 10ml, 15ml and 20ml for 500ml of water to be mixed in concrete. It was found that at 10ml of bacteria for 500ml of water yields enhanced strength properties when compared with the conventional concrete. As part of durability studies, when the cubes are immersed in 5% H2SO4, at 10ml of bacteria it showing the better performance than the conventional concrete.