Effect of the roughness of steel fibre surface on its wettability and the cement paste close to fibre surface

Characterisation of bond between cement paste and steel fibres with different surface roughness using SEM

“…The provided summary of previous studies reported in Refs. [10, 11] confirmed, that the utilisation of SEM enabled to indicate the significance of fibre surface roughness on the changes in the distribution of surrounding porosity and UH grains. The increase in fibre surface roughness facilitated the uniform wetting of fibres, leading to a reduction in the porosity near fibre surface.…”

“…A detailed information about the processing of the fibre surfaces and sample preparation are provided in Refs. [10,11].…”

“…(A–C) SE images of the processed fibre surfaces before being embedded in cement paste (adopted from Ref. [10]). (D–F) Examples of the BSE images of the surfaces of the pulled out fibres.…”

“…The k ‐means clustering algorithm was applied for the segmentation of cementitious matrix around fibre in Ref. [10] with the steps illustrated in Figure 1. In the case of k‐means clustering, the predefined number of five clusters was used based on clustering error calculation, which improved the quality of the segmentation (Figure 1C).…”

“…The current report provides a reflection on the benefits of SEM investigations applied in Refs. [10, 11] and corresponding results. The discussed outcomes and SEM images were used to characterise the microstructure of the ITZ around fibres with different roughness and indicate potential reasons of the degradation behaviour of fibre‐matrix bond under non‐monotonic loading.…”