Browsing by Author "Mouton, Christiaan Johannes"
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- ItemInvestigating the tensile creep of steel fibre reinforced concrete(Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2012-03) Mouton, Christiaan Johannes; Boshoff, William Peter; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Engineering. Dept. of Civil Engineering.ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Research in concrete has advanced to such an extent that it is now possible to add steel fibres to concrete in order to improve its durability and ductility. This led to a research group in Europe, FIB, who has provided guidelines to designing Steel Fibre Reinforced Concrete (SFRC) structures. They have found that it is possible for SFRC beams in flexure to be in static equilibrium. However, the time-dependent behaviour of SFRC has not been researched fully and it requires further investigation. When looking at a concrete beam in flexure there are two main stress zones, the compression zone and the tension zone, of which the tensile zone will be of great interest. This study will report on the investigation of the tensile time-dependent behaviour of SFRC in order to determine how it differs from conventional concrete. The concrete has been designed specifically to exhibit strain-softening behaviour so that the material properties of SFRC could be investigated fully. Factors such as shrinkage and tensile creep of SFRC were of the greatest importance and an experimental test setup was designed in order to test the tensile creep of concrete in a simple and effective manner. Comparisons were be made between the tensile creep behaviour of conventional concrete and SFRC where emphasis was placed on the difference between SFRC specimens before and after cracking occurred in order to determine the influence of steel fibre pull-out. The addition of steel fibres significantly reduced the shrinkage and tensile creep of concrete when un-cracked. It was however found that the displacement of fibre pull-out completely overshadowed the tensile creep displacements of SFRC. It was necessary to investigate what effect this would have on the deflection of SFRC beams in flexure once cracked. Viscoelastic behaviour using Maxwell chains were used to model the behaviour of the tensile creep as found during the tests and the parameters of these models were used for further analyses. Finite Element Analyses were done on SFRC beams in flexure in order simulate creep behaviour of up to 30 years in order to determine the difference in deflections at mid-span between un-cracked and pre-cracked beams. The analyses done showed that the deflections of the pre-cracked SFRC beams surpassed the requirements of the Serviceability Limit States, which should be taken into account when designing SFRC beams.