Durability Studies on Glass Fibre Reinforced Concrete

Abstract

The present day world is witnessing the construction of very challenging and difficult Civil Engineering structures. Quite often, concrete being the most important and widely used material is called upon to possess very high strength and sufficient workability properties. Efforts are being made in the field of Concrete Technology to develop such concretes with special characteristics. Researchers all over the world are attempting to develop high performance concretes by using fibres and other admixtures in concrete upto certain proportions. In the view of the global sustainable developments, it is imperative that fibres like Glass, carbon, Poly propylene and aramid fibers provide improvements in Tensile strength, Fatigue characteristics, durability, shrinkage characteristics, impact, cavitation, erosion resistance and serviceability of concrete. Fibres impart energy absorption, toughness and impact resistance properties to FRC material, and these characteristics in turn improve the fracture and fatigue properties of FRC. Research in GFRC (Glass fibre reinforced concrete) resulted in the development of an alkali resistance fibre (AR Glass fibres High Dispersion) that provided improved long term durability. This system was named alkali resistance glass fibre reinforced concrete. In the present experimental investigation the alkali resistance Glass fibres has been used to find out workability , resistance of concrete due to acids , sulphates and Rapid chloride permeability tests of M 30 , M40 and M 50 grade of glass fiber reinforced concrete and ordinary concrete at the 28 and 90 days with varying percentages of glass fibres .