Textile reinforcements for concrete: Fid-Bau Portal

Textile reinforcements for concrete

Engler, Thomas

By bonding textile reinforcing grids with fine grain concrete an innovative building material with excellent load-bearing characteristics emerges. This textile reinforced concrete offers an extremely thin construction with non-corrosive properties, precise formability for even complicated forms and broad application in the construction and civil engineering fields. However, this composite material requires high-performance textiles as reinforcements. These are created by working continuous high-performance filament yarns into flat or 3-D textile fabric structures. By further developing the multi-axial stitch-bonding technology, the basis is laid for an efficient production process for textile reinforcements. A substantial mechanical modification is the development of the transport system for the weft thread bands. This modification enables the production of grid-like, multi-axial reinforcements with uniform openings in the mesh. A further development is the modular coating technology, which ensures reproducible stiffness in the textiles. These technologies combined allow various textile reinforcements according to fiber material properties, the textile's shape and the binding and stabilization properties to be efficiently produced for all applications. Reinforcement structures, which uniformly distribute the loads within the composite, are in demand. A needle 'shift' technique for the stitch-bonding process allows the reinforcing thread to form an 'encircling' loop structure, which translates into a fabric with symmetrical layers. An analogous technology for the Leno weave machine allows the production of an undulation-free weave structure.