Fiber-Reinforced Concrete Testing
Fiber-Reinforced Concrete Testing
The addition of fibers in concrete provides increased flexure capacity, impact resistance, and crack-width control. Fiber-reinforced concrete’s ability to inhibit cracking when subjected to high impact or dynamic loads can be measured by testing its energy-absorption capacity. Master Builders Solutions provides this testing to help concrete producer partners identify toughness and flexural performance of their fiber-reinforced concrete.
ASTM C1609 (FRC Flexural Performance Testing)
Concrete is a brittle material that is strong in compression but weak in tension. Therefore, steel reinforcement, typically deformed bars, are used in concrete elements to carry the tensile forces after the concrete cracks. In some applications, such as slabs-on-ground, steel reinforcement in the form of either distributed steel bars or welded-wire reinforcement (WWR) is also provided to hold tight cracks that form due to temperature and shrinkage-induced tensile stresses. Increasingly, it is now common to replace temperature and shrinkage reinforcement, commonly referred to as secondary reinforcement, with fibers that are integrally added to a concrete mixture during mixing and randomly distributed to provide a multi-dimensional reinforcement system within the hardened concrete. Depending on dosage, fibers can provide a significant increase in the post-crack residual flexural strength, toughness and impact resistance of concrete, in addition to controlling crack width.
ASTM C1550 (FRC Flexural Toughness Testing)
Toughness, a measure of the energy-absorption capacity of a composite material, is used to characterize the ability of fiber-reinforced concrete (FRC) to redistribute stresses when subjected to high impact or dynamic loads. For mining and tunneling applications, flexural toughness of fiber-reinforced sprayed concrete (shotcrete) is an important design parameter.