Lightweight reinforced composite structures: Fid-Bau Portal

Lightweight reinforced composite structures

Marques, Paula Pina / Svensson, E. / Fangueiro, R. / Gonilho Pereira, C. / Jalali, S.

Overhead presentation. In the past years the development of fibrous materials for civil engineering applications has been receiving a great deal of attention by the textile and building and construction sectors and the scientific community. Concrete needs to be reinforced due to a fundamental lack of adequate tensile strength. One of the most widely used reinforcement material for concrete elements is steel. However, its use leads to a huge and common problem, the deterioration of concrete due to steel corrosion. In order to solve reinforced concrete deterioration problem, some solutions are being developed such as, the application of fibrous materials in order to improve the service life and performance durability of concrete reinforced structures - Textile Reinforced Concrete (TRC). Thus, textile industry is nowadays providing high strength textiles to the civil construction as a potential replacement for traditional building materials, namely wood, steel among others. The mechanical properties of these textiles structures make them excellent for widespread applications in construction world. Several types of structures can be used for concrete reinforcement. One of them are the nonwoven structures - randomly oriented structures - which in recent years have been drawn a great attention from building and construction industries. Another one is the DOS structures - directly oriented structures. The research study aims to understand the mechanical behaviour of the directly oriented structures and randomly oriented structures reinforced concrete slabs. The aim of the current work is the development and application of fibrous structures produced with high performance and natural fibres, to use as a concrete slab reinforcement element. Thus, conventional textile technologies were used to produce oriented and randomly oriented fibre structures, in a way that fibrous structures present the ability to compete with steel on the production of reinforced concrete elements. Six different directly oriented fibrous structures were produced with glass-fiber, modifying the longitudinal and transversal reinforcement. Randomly oriented fibrous structures were produced with flax and aramid fibres. Several samples were produced in order to identify the influence of holes of different geometry, size and density in the mechanical properties of reinforced concrete slabs. Bending tests were carried out in the reinforced concrete slabs in order to evaluate the mechanical performance of the fibrous structures as concrete reinforcement material. The textile reinforced concrete slabs mechanical behaviour was compared to that of steel reinforced slabs.