Fiber Reinforcement

Picture source: www.buzzle.com

INDUSTRIAL ENGINEER – VOLUME 46 NUMBER 6

New Concrete Material Doesn’t Crack As Much, Can Be Used To Build Cylinders.

Commonly, the construction industry commonly uses steel bars to reinforce concrete and increase. But Aimar Orbe-Mateo, an engineering faculty member at University of the Basque Country, pointed the possibility of reinforcing concrete with steel fibers through his research.

He said steel-fiber reinforced concrete has several advantages over conventional reinforced concrete. It’s less prone to cracking and can be used to make cylindrical holding tanks. The research team named the material steel fiber reinforced self-compacting concrete (SFRSCC).

“Self-compacting concrete, for example, is used in prefabricated buildings,” He said. “If this concrete is used in conventional building tasks, it is difficult to measure it out because it is very fluid, very runny. Yet its texture allows one to do away with the procedures that are used with conventional concrete (vibration, shoveling, etc), because it moves and becomes compact on its own.”

The size of the involved fibers is about 50 millimeters long and 1 millimeters in diameter, it’s small. Researchers tested it by building a wall 3 meters high and 6 meters long, dividing it into 380 samples. They also used the computer simulations on fluid dynamics to figure out how to predict the orientation of the fibers once the concrete compacted because the structure’s toughness depends on the orientation and distribution of the fibers.

While SFRSCC has been proved in the lab, Orbe-Mateo said it could be difficult to get building contractors on board because once the concrete is compacted, they cannot see how the fibers set with naked eye.