Experimental investigation of tensile fatigue behaviour of Textile-Reinforced Concrete (TRC): Effect of fatigue load and strain rate

Abstract

The objective of this study is to provide, by describing the experimental approach, a detailed description of the behaviour of multilayer Textile-Reinforced Concrete (TRC) composites under axial (tensile) olygocyclic fatigue. Different multilayer TRC composite configurations are proposed based on the carbon grid and glass grid associated with the carbon and/or glass fibre rods. A parametric study is conducted to validate the performance of these composite configurations with fatigue loads of 60% and 80% of the rupture load over 100 cycles. The experimental results show an increase in the rigidity and the dissipative capacity of the composite under fatigue loading with an invariance of the degradation mechanisms. An improvement in composite performance is observed with the addition of carbon and/or glass rods. Damage to composite during experiments is characterized by cracks orthogonal to the effort; their density is proportional to the applied fatigue load. The monotonous tensile tests (Post Fatigue) show that global and macroscopic performances have not declined after 100 cycles. The latex resin integration allows an improvement in residual capacities of composites that are subjected to cyclic tensile loading of up to 1000 cycles. The TRC composite performance increases with the rate of loading in the case of reinforcement with large size mesh.