Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Journal of Building Engineering journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jobe Eﬀects of sulfate rich solid waste activator on engineering properties and durability of modiﬁed high volume ﬂy ash cement based SCC Hoang-Anh Nguyen a , Ta-Peng Chang b, ⁎ , Jeng-Ywan Shih c a Department of Rural Technology, College of Rural Development, Can Tho University, Can Tho City 90000, Vietnam b Department of Civil and Construction Engineering, National Taiwan University of Science and Technology (NTUST) (Taiwan Tech), Taipei 106, Taiwan, R.O.C c Department of Chemical Engineering, Ming Chi University of Technology, New Taipei City 243, Taiwan, R.O.C ARTICLE INFO Keywords: Circulating Fluidized Bed Combustion Fly Ash High Volume Fly Ash Self-Compacting Concrete Engineering Properties Durability ABSTRACT The engineering properties and durability of high volume low calcium ﬂy ash (HVFA) cement based self-com- pacting concrete (SCC) modiﬁed with addition of circulating ﬂuidized bed combustion (CFBC) ﬂy ash were explored. Experimental results showed that an addition of CFBC ﬂy ash did not inﬂuence the stability and passing and ﬁlling abilities of modiﬁed HVFA cement based SCCs. But its presence signiﬁcantly improved the compressive strength, bonding behavior, and durability of the hardened SCC specimens. The added small amount of CFBC ﬂy ash was found to increase the earlier compressive strength of hardened SCC specimen at one day of curing up to 43.8% higher than that of the control SCC specimen, which indicates a remarkable con- tribution of CFBC ﬂy ash addition to shortening the time of construction. At ages of 3, 7, and 28 days, such increases were up to 30.2%, 22.3%, and 17.8%, respectively. 1. Introduction Nowadays, the modern cement factories have been under intense pressure to reduce the environmental impacts of their products and operations. Therefore, the sustainable development principle has be- come the most critical issue in the cement industry. In general, the sustainable manufacture of cement has been deﬁned as the creating process of manufactured products during which the negative eﬀects on environmental impacts and the consumptions of applied energy, human labor, and natural resources are minimized [1,2]. According to the deﬁnitions, sustainable manufacturing must ad- dress the integration of all the three indicators of environmental, social, and economic considerations, known as the triple bottom lines of sus- tainability. Sustainable achievement in accordance with economical challenge to obtain cost-eﬀective environmentally friendly building products has been deﬁned as a development of manufacturing process producing the resulting products with high potential of competitiveness through time. In accordance to environmental challenge, the sustain- able development has to be responsible for the consideration of mini- mizing the use of non-renewable natural resources and reducing/ eliminating the environmental impact. Also, the sustainable achieve- ment in accordance with the social challenge has been related to the promotion of both developed society and improved human life quality associated with the renewed quality of wealth and jobs. Currently, it has been apparently to accept that sustainable development for cement manufacture has to be evaluated based on not only the individual triple bottom lines of economic, environmental, and social performance but also to consider their interdependencies and costs [3–5]. High volume low calcium ﬂy ash (HVFA) concrete is one of the most promising candidates for achieving the sustainability development of concrete industry because it signiﬁcantly cuts the CO 2 emission per unit volume of concrete as compared with the conventional plain ordinary Portland cement (OPC) concrete [4]. Normally, the HVFA cementing binders are fabricated by very high quantity of low calcium ﬂy ash (at least 50% by weight) as partial replacement for OPC so that they have been widely applied for constructing ﬁelds without crucial require- ments for high mechanical properties [6,7]. By using low water to binder ratio (W/B) and high amount of superplasticizer (SP), the Ca- nada Centre for Mineral and Energy Technology (CANMET) paved the promising way for manufacturing high performance HVFA cement concrete qualifying most requirements of various kinds of construction because of its mostly satisfactory engineering and durability perfor- mance [6–15]. However, the emerged impacts of applying the HVFA cements for construction materials are the prolonged setting properties and decreases in both early and long-term compressive strengths [7,12,16,17]. Therefore, the pretreated ﬂy ash by mechanical grinding, applying accelerated curing, or addition of mineral or chemical acti- vator has widely adapted for fresh HVFA cement [17–24]. In jobsite https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jobe.2018.07.010 Received 4 April 2018; Received in revised form 12 July 2018; Accepted 12 July 2018 ⁎ Corresponding author. E-mail address: tpchang@mail.ntust.edu.tw (T.-P. Chang). Journal of Building Engineering 20 (2018) 123–129 2352-7102/ © 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. T