Numerical analysis of the flexural behavior of textile fabric -Reinforced concrete

Abstract

Textile reinforced concrete (TRC) produced by replacing steel reinforcements with non-corrosive textile reinforcements reduces the quantum of concrete. TRC consists of a cementitious binder and technical textiles used as reinforcement. These textile reinforcements can be made up of different fiber materials, such as alkali-resistant glass, carbon, aramid or polymeric fibers. In the present study, the flexural behavior of Textile Reinforced Concrete with two different reinforcements such as Aramid and Alkali-Resistant (AR) glass fibers were compared. Because aramid fibers have better mechanical and thermal properties and AR-glass was widely used as reinforcement because of its good adhesion nature. Influence of number of layers of textile reinforcement on flexural performance of TRC was also studied. TRC slabs were designed based on a general strain-hardening tensile and elastic perfectly plastic compression model as derived by Soranakom and Mobasher (2008) as per ACI 318–08. Based on designed dimensions, 24 different slabs were modelled with two different reinforcements along with varying the number of layers as 3, 4, 5 and 6 layers and the flexural behavior of the slabs were studied using ABAQUS software. The influence of a number of textile layers was investigated with respect to ultimate bending stress in which five layers of textile fabrics shows maximum bending stress. It is also observed when the number of layers is increased beyond five, there is an underutilization of the textile layers caused due to delamination of textile from the binder. An efficiency has been introduced to determine the optimal performance of TRC. Bending stress of TRC slabs with aramid fiber reinforcement was about 15% higher than AR glass fiber reinforcement. It is observed that aramid fiber can withstand more flexural load compared to alkali-resistance glass fiber due to its better mechanical properties.