Effects of steel fibres and silica fume on the behaviours of square ferrocement slabs under flexural loading

Abstract

Ferrocement is a type of thin reinforced concrete made of a cement-sand matrix with closely spaced relatively small diameter wire meshes, with or without steel bars of small diameter which are known as skeletal steel. This work concerns the behaviours of square ferrocement slabs with dimensions of 500 × 500 × 30 mm when subjected to flexural load. This study included testing thirteen ferrocement slabs, and the main variables considered in the experimental work were the number of wire mesh layers, percentage of silica fume and presence of steel fibre. The effects of these variables on the behaviours and load carrying capacities of tested slabs under central loads were investigated. From the experimental results, increasing the percentage of silica fume from 0% to 6% caused ultimate flexural loads to increase up to 4.5% replacement. The load carrying capacity also increases with presence of steel fibre reinforcement, and the ductility is high where steel fibres are included. The results also suggest that an increase in wire mesh layers from six to ten layers leads to an increase in load capacity by 76%. Finally, the results show that the addition of steel fibres can reduce the crack width and increase the number of cracks compared to samples without fibres.