Abstract
The aim of this study is to develop a process to produce high-performance cement-based composites reinforced with flax nonwoven fabrics, analyzing the influence of the fabric structure—thickness and entanglement—on mechanical behavior under flexural and tensile loadings. For this purpose, composite with flax nonwoven fabrics with different thicknesses were first prepared and their cement infiltration was evaluated with backscattered electron (BSE) images. The nonwoven fabrics with the optimized thickness were then subjected to a water treatment to improve their stability to humid environments and the fiber-matrix adhesion. For a fixed thickness, the effect of the nonwoven entanglement on the mechanical behavior was evaluated under flexural and direct tension tests. The obtained results indicate that the flax nonwoven fabric reinforcement leads to cement composites with substantial enhancement of ductility.
Highlights
Natural fibers have been extensively studied as reinforcement for cementitious materials since they provide adequate stiffness, strength, and bonding capacity to enhance their flexural strength, toughness, and crack resistance [1]
It was found that the structures with higher weight and thickness did not allow good infiltration of the cement particles into the porous structure of the nonwoven fabrics (Figure 1b)
The use of nonwoven flax fabrics as reinforcement in cement-based composites leads to cement materials with very high ductility
Summary
Natural fibers have been extensively studied as reinforcement for cementitious materials since they provide adequate stiffness, strength, and bonding capacity to enhance their flexural strength, toughness, and crack resistance [1]. In the majority of the studies about cement composites reinforced with natural fibers, the reinforcement is in the form of short fibers (usually pulps) randomly dispersed on the matrix [2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10] and only a few studies describe the performance of composites with the fibers in the form of textile structures, like directional, woven, or nonwoven fabrics [11,12,13,14,15]. The most common fabric structures used for the reinforcement of cement composites are very open directional fabrics (with the filaments aligned in one or more direction) or woven fabrics
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