Foundation, Concrete and Earthquake Engineering

How are Steel Fibers Used in Concrete?

Unreinforced concrete is a brittle material. It has low impact resistance and low tensile strength. The transverse and longitudinal reinforcement of steel are widely used in all over the world to have better moment, shear, axial force and sometimes torsional resistance properties. Many post have published in this blog about those. In this post we will discuss how and how much steel fiber is used in concrete to give it some special properties of where concrete was weak earlier.

It is observed that with addition of short length, small diameter steel fibers distributed randomly in concrete, improves its tensile strength and properties of impact resistance. This concrete with steel fiber is called steel fiber reinforced concrete. It should be noted that improvement of above properties depends on some factors. Some of them are:

1. Shape of fiber

2. Amount of fiber (in volume percentage) in concrete mix

3. The pattern in which fiber are distributed in concrete mix

4. Material used as fiber in this post it is steel

Bundled steel fibers for concrete  Fibers are bundled with glue(water soluble) and these bundles are used in concrete mixing. During mixing process the glue get dissolved and the fibers are distributed evenly in the mix. It is established that an addition of fibers in 2 to 3 % by volume of concrete the following properties of concrete increased by 2-3 times:

a. Flexural strength

b. Crack resistance

c. Explosion resistance etc.
Steel fiber reinforced concrete is tested by third point loading according to ASTM C 1609

They are applied in tunnel lining, bridge decks, airport runways,warehouse floor of factory where handling of heavy equipments is common and highway pavement construction etc. 

2 comments:

  1. Nice information posted here. One can get the details of steel fiber for hydro projects tunnel at Precision Drawell.

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  2. Higher grades of concrete can be achieved by steel fibre concrete helping in overall reduction in sections of concrete members. Nice Information..keep sharing.

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