Performance evaluation of fiber-reinforced concrete produced with steel fibers extracted from waste tire

Abstract

With the increasing number of vehicles in the world, the amount of waste tires is increasing day by day. In this case, the disposal of expired tires will cause serious environmental problems. In recent years, instead of disposing of tire wastes, most of them have been started to be recycled to produce fiber-reinforced concrete. Thus, steel fibers recovered from waste tires have been preferred as an alternative to industrial steel fibers due to their environmentally friendly and low-cost advantages. In this study, an experimental study was carried out to explore the effect of fiber content on the fresh and hardened state of the concrete. To achieve this goal, compression, splitting tensile, and flexure tests were carried out to observe the performance of the concrete with tire-recycled steel fibers with the ratios of 1%, 2% and 3%. There is an improvement in the mechanical properties of the concrete with the increase of the volume fraction of the steel fiber. However, a significant reduction in workability was observed after the addition of 2% steel fibers. Therefore, it is recommended to utilize 2% tire-recycled steel fibers in practical applications. Furthermore, experimental results of concrete with tire-recycled steel fibers were collected from the literature and empirical equations based on these results were developed in order to predict the compressive and splitting tensile strengths.