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Curing concrete is actually maintaining the moisture content as long as possible in order for concrete to develop its hardening properties during its early stages. However, good curing is rarely to occur and that's due to lack of knowledge by workers at site and shortage of water at the site area. Therefore, to investigate and produce a self-curing concrete that relays on itself in curing without the need of an outer source of water as a curing agent with a similar performance of a normal concrete using external water as a source of curing agent. This paper is investigating the effect of baby diapers as a self-curing agent. The mix design consists of high strength ordinary Portland cement with a grade of 52.5 along with coarse aggregate and washed river sand as a fine aggregate mixed along with silica fume to enhance the strength of concrete side by side with super-plasticizer to improve the workability of concrete, with the addition of baby diapers. Mix proportion has been divided into 4 mix with different proportion of baby diapers acting as the changeable variable while the rest of the components is fixed, the 4 mixes are said to be Control Mix (CM), 1% of baby diapers polymer, 2% of baby diapers polymer, and 3% of baby diapers polymer. In order to have a fair comparison in an equal number of cubes, cylinders, and prisms are molded and distributed equally to be tested under 3 different situations which are curing tank, room temperature, and sun-dry. The results can be concluded that the optimum baby-diapers ratio to be used is 1% and the optimum curing condition is said to be room-temperature as it gave the highest compressive strength and split tensile strength. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

High Performance Concrete (HPC) with small water/binder ratio has been widely used in the construction industry nowadays. However, HPC is found to be extremely delicate to the threat of early age cracking which vastly affect the concrete quality. Previous researchers have proposed self-curing technique as a solution to the problem. A self-curing concrete is able to absorb moisture from the surrounding for proper cement hydration. This paper study the environmental monitoring and material characterization of new and used diapers hydrogel polymer. In this study, diapers hydrogel polymer is proposed as a self-curing agent due to its amazing water absorption ability. Laboratory testing was done for environmental monitoring of both new and used diaper polymer, including turbidity test, colour test, pH test, biochemical oxygen demand (BOD) and chemical oxygen demand (COD) test whilst for material characterization, Wavelength Dispersive X-Ray Fluorescence (WDXRF) test, X-Ray Diffraction (XRD) analysis and Fourier Transform Infrared (FTIR) analysis was conducted. As a result, addition of used diapers polymer with pH of 8.34 into high performance concrete mix has no significant effect of the alkalinity of concrete, which it is a crucial requirement to maintain the performance of concrete structure. Hence, it concluded that polymer source from used diaper has a good potential as self-curing agent in concrete. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]