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High mechanical performance of fibre reinforced cementitious composites: the role of “casting-flow induced” fibre orientation

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Abstract

Governing the dispersion and the orientation of fibres in concrete through a suitably balanced set of fresh state properties and a carefully designed casting procedure, is a feasible and cost-effective way to achieve a superior mechanical performance of fibre reinforced cementitious composites, which may be required by the intended application, even keeping the fibre content at relatively low values (e.g. around 1% by volume). In this paper the possibility of pursuing the above said “integrated” approach has been addressed in the framework of larger project focused on developing a deflection-hardening FRCC (DHFRCC), reinforced with 100 kg/m3 (1.27% by volume) of short steel fibres (13 mm long and 0.16 mm in diameter). The material has to be employed to manufacture thin (30 mm) roof elements, without any kind of conventional reinforcement, which have been anticipated to work, as simply supported beams, over a 2.5 m span. The study hence paves the way to the possibility of exploiting at an industrial level the correlation among fresh state performance, fibre dispersion and hardened state properties of self consolidating steel fibre reinforced concrete to achieve enhanced structural performance tailored to the specific application.

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Acknowledgements

Cooperation between Politecnico di Milano and Bogazici University, Istanbul, Turkey, was made possible by the support of the regional Council of Lombardia, Project Code PD08BVARI01 which is gratefully acknowledged. Work on micrograph image analysis done at Bogazici University, Istanbul, was funded by Bogazici University Research Fund, Project Code 07HA403. The support of BASF Construction Chemicals within a research grant to Politecnico di Milano is also gratefully acknowledged.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Structural Engineering, Politecnico di Milano, Piazza Leonardo da Vinci 32, 20133, Milan, Italy

    Liberato Ferrara & Marco di Prisco

  2. Muhendislik Fakultesi, Insaat Muhendisligi Bolumu, Bogazici University, 34342, Bebek/Istanbul, Turkey

    Nilufer Ozyurt

Authors
  1. Liberato Ferrara
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  2. Nilufer Ozyurt
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  3. Marco di Prisco
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Liberato Ferrara.

Appendices

Appendix A

See Table 8.

Table 8 Calculation of global fibre orientation angles [27]
Full size table

Appendix B

Errors and ambiguities involved in measurement

  1. 1.

    Two possible values of in plane angle since fibres with orientations ϕ′ and ϕ′ + 180 have identical cross-sections. For complete 3-D information, at least 2 orthogonal cross-section of a specimen should be analyzed. In this study a second cross-section is not needed becuase, only the orientation densities in the reference directions (x, y, z) were needed and these values were not affected by the symmetry assumption.

  2. 2.

    The probability (of a fibre) of being intercepted by the cross-section under consideration. It is well known that the probability of intercepting a fibre which is aligned vertical to the cutting plane is much higher compared to a fibre aligned parallel to the section. F function is used to count in for this effect.

  3. 3.

    The third ambiguity occurs due to the fibres oriented nearly perpendicular to the sectioning plane (θ′ ≈ 0). That ambiguity can be decreased by increasing the magnification of micrographs. In this study, the tendency of fibres being oriented in reference directions was needed. Therefore, a detailed error analysis was not carried out, instead orientation analysis was repeated without including the fibres with θ′ < 5° and the results were compared (Table 9). No drastic change is seen in the resulting orientation tendencies, when fibres with θ′ < 5° are not included.

Table 9 Orientation density functions calculated for all fibres and selected fibres
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Ferrara, L., Ozyurt, N. & di Prisco, M. High mechanical performance of fibre reinforced cementitious composites: the role of “casting-flow induced” fibre orientation. Mater Struct 44, 109–128 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1617/s11527-010-9613-9

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