Enhancement of Mechanical Properties of Lightweight Foamed Concrete using Fibermesh

Abstract

Foamed concrete is one of the lightweight concretes that has been investigated widely due to its potential use as a building element as well as due to its benefits, which are low in self weight, more durable, self-compacting and has excellent thermal insulation properties. The major limitation of this material is because of its characteristics which are weak in tension and suffers high shrinkage. Therefore, the introduction of fiber in foamed concrete becomes a popular research focus among researchers in conducting a study since it can aid in overcoming this problem. Thus, this research was performed to investigate the mechanical properties of foamed concrete with the enclosure of fibermesh. Fibermesh with a size of 160g weight per square meter was examined on three densities of foamed concrete (800kg/m3, 1100kg/m3, 1400 kg/m3). The cement-sand used in this study was constantly maintained at 1:1.5 and the water to cement ratio was fixed at 0.45. Moreover, this study also explored the improvement of foamed concrete strength from without any addition of fiber (control) to 1, 2, and 3 layer(s) of fibermesh enclosure. There were three experimental tests conducted to determine the foamed concrete strength which are compressive strength test, flexural test, and splitting tensile test. The experimental results showed that, foamed concrete gave the highest strength results at a density of 1400kg/m3 with the \ enclosure of 3 layers of fibermesh while the lowest strength was attained at 800kg/m3 density with no addition of fiber (control specimen). The positive improvement in foamed concrete strength obviously showed after enclosure of fibermesh compared to the plain foamed concrete, where at density of 1400kg/m3 with 3 layers enclosure of fibermesh, 96% of changes was recorded in the compressive strength test while 332% was shown in the flexural strength test and 421% was recorded in the splitting tensile test.