Cow hair, a by-product of tannery waste, is usually stockpiled on a large scale as waste, which leads to serious environmental impacts. In this paper, cow hair was used as a reinforcement fiber to improve the mechanical strength of iron tailing-based foam concrete. The effects of the amount of cow hair fiber on the apparent density, compressive strength, and flexural strength of foam concrete were investigated by a series of characterization methods. Meanwhile, Image-Pro Plus software was used to analyze the porosity, average pore size, roundness, and other parameters of the specimens with different amounts of cow hair fiber. Results revealed that a proper amount of cow hair fiber can form a stable three-dimensional network structure inside the foam concrete and promote a uniform distribution and size of the pore structure inside the test piece. This could effectively improve the compressive strength, flexural strength, and crack resistance of the foam concrete, and when the fiber content was 0.2 wt%, the foam concrete exhibited the best mechanical properties, with a compressive strength of 11.19 MPa and a flexural strength of 3.58 MPa. The present work was in agreement with the strategic objective of resource recycling and solid waste utilization, which was conducive to the development of the circular and green economy.
Keywords: chemical foaming; cow hair; foam concrete; mechanical performance; stomatal structure.