Strength and durability characteristics of concrete blended with micro level fibres

Abstract

Concrete is among the most used building materials, which is often produced using materials that are readily available locally. To fulfill the demands of modern building, the current trend in concrete technology is to make concrete stronger and more durable. The primary goal of this research is to examine the comparative analysis of mechanical parameters of different size cubes and to determine the durability parameters of concrete of grade M40 incorporated with various dosages of glass fibre and steel fibre in a micro size level. Concrete's durability and brittleness are both improved with the inclusion of fibres for a dosage of 0.1 to 1% of concrete volume. In this investigation we researched the compressive strength variations of 150 mm size cubes and 100 mm size cubes cast with 0.5% & 1% addition of glass and steel fibre. The ultimate compressive strength of concrete cubes with 1% addition of glass fibre at 28 days of curing is 49 MPa and 51 MPa for 150 mm size and 100 mm size cubes respectively. The various mix proportions are tested for different durability tests like acid resistance test, sulphate attack test, alkalinity of concrete and water absorption. The strength loss of mix with 0.5% addition of glass and steel fibres due to acid attack are 19% and 19.2% which is low compared to control concrete. Also the average strength loss of mix with 1% addition of glass fibre is low when compared to other mixes in a sulphate environment. The water absorption percentage is low for concrete mixes blended with glass fibres. The alkalinity of concrete varies with pH of 10.5 to 9.5 for various mixes. Through this experiment, it was discovered that glass fibre blended concrete outperformed control mix and mixes with steel fibres in terms of all strength and durability metrics.