An investigation into the use of fibres in concrete industrial ground-floor slabs.pdf
An investigation into the use of fibres in
concrete industrial ground-floor slabs
Wafa Labib and Nick Eden
School of the Built Environment, Liverpool John Moores University, Liverpool,
L3 3AF
Abstract:
The concrete industrial ground-floor slab is a key structural element in most industrial enterprises. The art of designing most industrial floors is to provide sufficient reinforcement to control the amount and size of cracks to a level consistent with the intended use of the floor. However, one of the most common causes of cracking in ground-floor slabs is that the tensile stresses imposed on the concrete by external restraint to thermal or shrinkage contraction exceed the tensile strength of the concrete. Therefore, the function of the steel-fabric reinforcement or the fibre-reinforcement is to limit the crack width by preventing micro-cracks from becoming macro-cracks and thus protect concrete from aggressive environmental attack.
The use of fibres in flooring concrete has increased with the development of fast-track construction. In fact nearly 65% of the fibres produced worldwide is currently used in industrial floors, road pavements and other slabs-on-grade. Fibre-reinforced concrete floors offer significant economic and technical advantages over conventional steel-fabric reinforced concrete floors, such as increasing toughness and ductility, tighter crack control and improved load-carrying capacity.
Currently, the use of fibres in concrete, while growing, is not as widespread as its mechanical advantages would suggest it should be. A possible reason for this is the natural hesitancy of engineers and practitioners to use a material for which adequate; experience, experimental data and code provisions have not been well developed.
Moreover, the availability of various commercial types and brands of fibres could have added to the difficulty of selecting the proper materials for particular field applications.
This paper reports upon the literature review of using various types of fibres as a replacement to steel-fabric reinforcement in industrial ground floors. A programme of experimental tests on beams and slabs is on the way to provide tests results that can be used as an input data into the finite element analysis programme.