UTILIZATION OF SOME INDUSTRIAL WASTES IN THE PRODUCTION OF CEMENT BRICKS

摘要

Brick has been one of the basic building materials used in construction activities since the time immemorial. With the continuously rising demand for building bricks in Egypt (about 10 billion units per year), progress in brick industry should necessarily take into account the need for conservation of national resources and the environmental concerns. An approach to saving energy and the addressing environmental concern is to use industrial wastes in the manufacture of cement bricks. Cement manufacture in Egypt discards annually approximately 2.5 million tons of cement dust collected from exhausted gases of cement kilns nodulizers and cooling towers. The collected dust contains excessive concentration of alkalis that make it unsuitable for return to the cement making process. The reutilization of this cement dust would eliminate costly pollution control measures that are required to prevent degradation of air, land and water in the vicinity of dust disposal sites. The utilization of Blast-furnace slag cement in brick industry instead of ordinary Portland cement will not only lessens the amount of industrial by-product that is landfilled, but also conserves a virgin manufacturing product (Portland cement), reduces air emissions at the blast-furnace, and decreases the overall embodied energy required to produce cementitious materials in cement bricks industry. The aim of the present investigation is to study the possibility of using the by-pass cement kiln dust and the blast-furnace slag cement in the cement bricks manufacturing.