Behaviour of cementitious composites reinforced with polypropylene fibres using restrained eccentric ring test

Abstract

This paper proposes an eccentric ring test that can be used to determine the behaviour of restrained cement materials with regard to cracking time and select concrete mixtures that are less likely to crack. The effects of polypropylene fibres on the cracking of cementitious composites were investigated using three volume fractions of the fibres and eccentric rings under restrained shrinkage. Different volume fractions (0.4%, 0.6%, and 0.8%) of the fibres lead to considerable improvements in terms of the number of cracks, cracking age, and crack area. A regression model for predicting the cracking properties was developed. The null hypothesis was that the estimated model parameters would be equal to zero. Only parameters whose t-test p-values were less than 0.05 were included in the regression model, and the model effectively predicted the cracking behaviour.