FIBRE REINFORCED CONCRETE
Fibre reinforced concrete (FRC) may be defined as a composite materials made with Portland cement, aggregate, and incorporating discrete discontinuous fibres. Plain unreinforced concrete is a brittle material, with a low tensile strength and a low strain capacity. The role of randomly distributes discontinuous fibres is to bridge across the cracks that develop provides some post-cracking ductility. If the fibres are sufficiently strong, sufficiently bonded to material, and permit the FRC to carry significant stresses over a relatively large strain capacity in the post-cracking stage.
There are other ways of increasing the strength of concrete. The real contribution of the fibres is to increase the toughness of the concrete (defined under the load vs. deflection curve), under any type of loading. That is, the fibres tend to increase the strain at peak load, and provide a great deal of energy absorption in post-peak portion of the load vs. deflection curve.
When the fibre reinforcement is in the form of short discrete fibres, they act effectively as rigid inclusions in the concrete matrix. Physically, they have thus the same order of magnitude as aggregate inclusions; steel fibre reinforcement cannot therefore be regarded as a direct replacement of longitudinal reinforcement in reinforced and prestressed structural members. However, because of the inherent material properties of fibre concrete, the presence of fibres in the body of the concrete or the provision of a tensile skin of fibre concrete can be expected to improve the resistance of conventionally reinforced structural members to cracking, deflection and other serviceability conditions.
The fibre reinforcement may be used in the form of three – dimensionally randomly distributed fibres throughout the structural member when the added advantages of the fibre to shear resistance and crack control can be further utilised . On the other hand, the fibre concrete may also be used as a tensile skin to cover the steel reinforcement when a more efficient two – dimensional orientation of the fibres could be obtained.
DIFFERENT TYPES OF FIBRES USED FOR FRC