In the field of civil engineering, Silica Sand termed as standard sand has various applications. From manufacturing of glass and glass products to being used as a filter media in water and sewage treatment plants, its use is extremely broad currently. In the construction industry, Silica Sand is used for testing of hydraulic cement, determination of soil density with the sand cone replacement method as well as the production of different construction materials. However, Ethiopia does not manufacture standard sand currently. That is why the country is losing high volume of foreign currency to import this sand from abroad. The purpose of this study is, therefore, to try and locate potential natural sand deposits which satisfies the required quality of standard sand to produce locally. To achieve this objective a desk study is conducted to locate possible standard sand sources, samples from three selected sites from Dire Dawa City, Aleltu River deposit and Alage natural sand deposit were taken. In their natural state, the samples do not satisfy the quality requirements to be used as standard sand. Therefore, the samples are thoroughly washed, oven dried, sieved and separated to various size fractions and mixed in a predetermined proportion to fulfill the grading requirements of the standard sand specification. In all the test results on the processed samples, the compressive and flexural strength of mortar cubes and prisms made with local samples gave lower values compared to the imported standard sand. However, the samples from Diredawa and Aleltu show a relatively uniform trend both in the compressive and flexural test results as compared with the imported standard sand. Hence there is a high possibility that these two sand sources can replace the imported standard sand after some processing. The sample from Alage showed some efflorescence, bad quality to consider it as standard sand.

Standard sand

Aleltu sample

Dire Dawa sample

Alage sample