Vol. 3, Issue 5, Part B (2017)

Abstract
A brick is a building material used to make walls, pavements and other elements in masonry construction. Pulverized ash brick or Fly ash brick technology is a process of converting industrial waste materials into quality building materials. At present, the technology is well established in converting thermal power plant waste into quality bricks. The advantages of using fly ash brick are, the brick carries good compressive strength, provide better thermal insulation than red clay bricks, cheaper compared to clay bricks and are environment friendly. One of the important ingredients of fly ash brick is natural sand or river sand. However, due to the increased use of bricks in almost all types of construction works, the demand of natural or river sand has been increased. The infrastructure development such as express highway projects, power projects and industrial developments have started in a big way now. Available natural sand is getting depleted and also it is becoming costly. Thus, to meet these increased demands of construction industry, excessive quarrying of sand from river beds is taking place causing the shortage of natural sand. This scarcity of natural sand due to such heavy demands in growing construction activities have forced engineers to find a suitable substitute. In this study an attempt has been made to identify the strength of fly ash bricks in which the natural sand is replaced with vermiculite, quarry dust and steel slag in the proportions of 10%, 25%, 50%, 75% and 100%. The best proportion of GGBFS in the fly ash bricks is also identified in this report. In this report the fly ash bricks are self cured by forming geo polymers.