REACTION TO FIRE OF MASONRY MORTAR BLENDED WITH ENVIRONMENTALLY-FRIENDLY MATERIALS

Sustainable development in the twenty-first century necessitates the strategic use of renewable, environmentally-friendly materials as well as inventive thinking. Hence, it is unavoidable to assess their performance and engineering properties to be accepted by the civil engineering community. Traditional masonry structures have relied heavily on conventional cement-lime mortars. Owing to enormous natural resources consumption (limestone and clay) and a large amount of CO2 discharged into the environment due to the thermal treatment of raw materials, these mortars might be classified as unfriendly in contemporary engineering practice. Therefore, in recent years, extensive research has been conducted on the application of various pozzolanic materials as a feasible option for developing new, alternative types of greener masonry mortars. However, just a few studies have addressed the fire behaviour aspect of masonry mortars, particularly those containing supplementary cementitious materials. This paper focuses on the reaction to fire of nine different masonry mortar mixtures incorporating locally accessible waste materials: ceramic waste powder, fly ash, and biomass ash, as cement substitutes. Non-combustibility and the gross heat of combustion tests were performed with the aim of categorizing investigated mortars into fire reaction classes. The results indicate that all mortar combinations meet the requirements for the A1 fire reaction class, while all blended mortars had lower mass loss and heat release in relation to the reference cement-lime mortars.