With the aim of reducing greenhouse gas emissions from energy consumption and advancing the green energy transition, this study employs sodium hydroxide and water glass as activators to facilitate the replacement of fossil fuels with renewable energy sources, with physically activated recycled micro-powder serving as an auxiliary cementitious material to prepare alkali-activated recycled hollow concrete. This study pioneers the application of the coarse aggregate tight-packing theory (bulk density method) to the preparation of alkali-activated recycled hollow concrete containing sand. By integrating Matlab image binarization techniques, we quantitatively analyzed the causes of porosity deviation, achieving precise alignment between target and actual porosity. This work fills a theoretical gap in the quantitative design of porosity for this concrete type. Additionally, the effects of different binder material dosages and pore volumes on the mechanical properties and permeability coefficients of sand-containing porous concrete were evaluated. Experimental results indicate that the calculated pore volume of sand-containing porous concrete prepared using the dense-packing theory (bulk density method) exhibits a smaller average error compared to the actual pore volume. As the amount of cementitious materials increases, the compression strength of permeable concrete gradually increases. When the cementitious material content is 450 kg/m3, and the target porosity is 15%, the concrete’s 28-day compressive strength reaches 21.4 MPa. At a porosity of 15%, the permeability coefficient ranges from 5.2 to 5.7 mm/s.
Guo et al. (2026) studied this question.