A review on the effect of fly ash characteristics and their variations on the synthesis of fly ash based geopolymer

There are more than four decades since the last 1970s where geopolymers concrete was first introduced and developed to use as a replacement to conventional concrete material which uses cement as a binder. And since the last two decades, geopolymers which utilized fly ash as aluminosilicate source material, i.e. fly ash based geopolymers, have been investigated. Many researchers present how to produce the best fly ash based geopolymer with a various source of constituent material as well as mixing formula to achieve exceptional concrete performance. Although there is a similar trend towards factors affecting the result of fly ash based geopolymer synthesis, there is still remain a wide range in mixture proportion. The considerable variation in fly ash characteristics as source material in the synthesis can very likely be one of the causes of this problem. This paper attempts to identify the effect of source material variation of geopolymer concrete, particularly which use fly ash as source material and focuses on the variation of its characteristics and the effects to properties of concrete. From the reviews it concluded that different sources (and even the same source, but different batch) of fly ash materials will give some different characteristics of the fly ash, where it would affect the synthesis process of the fly ash based geopolymer concretes.