Impacts of interfacial bonding between concrete substrate and cast/sprayed HPFRCC on flexural behaviour

Abstract

The performance of repair materials is greatly enhanced by the integrity of the rehabilitation system, which depends on the behaviour of the boundary or interface bond between the repair material and the concrete substrate. The effects of the implementation of repair materials (casting or spraying), the spraying direction and the roughness of the concrete substrate on the interfacial bond behaviour were experimentally investigated through four-point bending tests on prisms of size 300 × 76.2 × 40 mm. As a first step, 2 cm thick concrete substrates were fabricated with five different types of surface roughness. After 28 days of curing, the repair material (a high-performance (high-ductility) fibre-reinforced cementitious composite (HPFRCC)) was sprayed or poured into specific moulds. The HPFRCC was developed using local materials and had a tensile strain capacity of 3.7%. The spraying direction and surface roughness of the concrete substrate were found to impact the ultimate deflection rate significantly; upward spraying produced the lowest deflection rate and downward spraying the highest. Because beams are often repaired from the lower part and spraying is in the upwards direction, the casting method must be used because of the negative effect of gravity on the interfacial bonding between the concrete substrate and the repair material.