Determination of the Material Properties of the Reinforcement for Textile-Reinforced Concrete Elements

Abstract

Textile-reinforced concrete has emerged in recent years as a new and valuable construction material. The design of textile-reinforced concrete requires knowledge on the mechanical properties of different textile types as well as their reinforcing behaviour under different loading conditions. Conventional load-bearing tests tend to be complex, time-consuming, costly and can even lack consistent specifications. To mitigate such drawbacks, a standardised tensile test for fibre strands was developed aiming at characterising the material properties needed for the design of a textile-reinforced concrete component. For the sake of this study, an epoxy resin-soaked AR-glass reinforcement was considered. The standardised tensile test uses a fibre strand with 160 mm length, which shall be cut out of a textile grid. The results show that the textile reinforcement has a linear-elastic behaviour, and the ultimate tensile strength can be statistically modelled by a Gumbel distribution. Furthermore, the results indicate that the modulus of elasticity is not influenced by the length or the number of fibre strands. Therefore, the mean value from the standardised test can be used for the design purpose. These findings are essential to derive an appropriate partial safety factor for the calculation of the design values of the tensile strength and can be used to determine the failure probability of textile-reinforced concrete components.