The Potential of Wood Ash to Be Used as a Supplementary Cementitious Material in Cement Mortars
buildings 2025
Oskars Leščinskis, Alise Sapata, Ģirts Būmanis, Māris Šinka, Xiangming Zhou, Diāna Bajāre

This study explores the application of wood ash (WA) as a partial replacement for PC in mortar. Three pre-treatment methods were applied to WA to enhance its reactivity, and it was then incorporated into mortar at two different substitution levels of 10 and 30%. Tests on compressive and flexural strength were conducted on the hardened mortar samples. All hardened mortar samples containing WA showed a decrease in mechanical properties compared to the reference sample without WA. The highest compressive and flexural strength of the samples with WA were observed for those containing 10% of sieved and slaked WA. The compressive and flexural strength of these samples after 28 days were 56 and 9 MPa, respectively, whereas those of the reference samples were 62 and 10 MPa, re-spectively. Based on the results, the best-performing samples on the compressive test un-derwent additional testing for freeze–thaw resistance to assess their durability. The mass loss of the reference sample and that with 10% of sieved and slaked WA after 56 freeze–thaw cycles was 11,800 and 13,800 g/m2, respectively. The findings revealed that increas-ing the proportion of WA typically led to a decline in the mechanical properties of mortar compared to conventional mixtures. However, with appropriate pre-treatment techniques, the quality and performance of mortar containing WA were significantly improved, demonstrating its potential as a sustainable alternative in reducing the carbon footprint of PC production.


Hyperlink
https://doi.org/10.3390/buildings15091507

Leščinskis, O., Sapata, A., Būmanis, Ģ., Šinka, M., Zhou, X., Bajāre, D. The Potential of Wood Ash to Be Used as a Supplementary Cementitious Material in Cement Mortars. buildings, 2025, Vol. 15, No. 1507, pp.1-13.

Publication language
English (en)
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